


The Long Game

by thedevilchicken



Category: Blade (Movie Series)
Genre: Abduction, Blood Drinking, Bloodletting, Canon-Typical Violence, Captivity, Consensual Violence, Dubious Science, Dysfunctional Relationships, Emotional Baggage, Explicit Sexual Content, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Medical Experimentation, Post-Canon, Redemption, Vampire Hunters, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-16
Updated: 2016-06-16
Packaged: 2018-07-15 11:25:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7220425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He's <i>thousands</i> of years old, King," Abby said. "If anyone knows about playing the long game, it's him."</p><p>Or: The Nightstalkers take Drake captive. Hannibal's not sure he didn't let them do it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Long Game

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tarlan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tarlan/gifts).



If there's one thing Hannibal King knows a whole lot better than most people - and he guesses there's got to be at least one thing - it's that the world at large is fucking weird. 

Sure, okay, so everyone knows the world's weird. It's weird that Dolly Parton can still carry a tune after so much cosmetic surgery she's started to look like a life-size action figure of herself. It's weird that shitty reality TV's somehow still on the air these days (though if properly motivated, Hannibal might admit to watching America's Got Talent just every now and then and asking himself if his team wouldn't make pretty much the best act ever). And it's weird that pretty much no one takes him at his word - after all, c'mon, the tracking chip _was_ implanted in his ass cheek and he _does_ kinda like David Hasselhoff. The dude's big in Germany, y'know, and frankly, anyone who says Baywatch is not a classic's just not someone he wants to know. 

But the kind of weird he means is the kind of weird no one really knows exists, at least not the general public. He means vampires. He means werewolves. He means fucking trolls under bridges, not that he means _fucking_ trolls under bridges 'cause all things considered even his sex life's not that weird, just, fuck, he knows what he means. There's monsters out there, real ones, nasty ones, shitty ones, really fucking creepy ones, and like a bunch of total dumbasses - heroic dumbasses, sure, but dumbasses all the same - the Nightstalkers chase 'em all down. Sometimes they get their collective ass handed to them. Usually, though, at least more often than not, they come out on top.

That's what they're doing now, or at least what they're on their way to do, in a mercifully air-conditioned SUV heading over several state lines into Texas from Nevada with the rest of the team following close behind in a second vehicle 'cause Jesus Christ if chupacabras haven't turned out to be real, who knew? Caulder's in the driver's seat because shit if the guy doesn't love to drive and Abby called shotgun so she could ride with her feet up on the dash and her iPod turned up loud. Hannibal's pretty sure she's got an actual goddamn shotgun in the footwell somewhere, just in case they run into trouble that's not the kind they're scheduled for. It happens pretty often. More often than you might think.

So there Hannibal is, chilling in the back as they pull off of the crappy back road, wondering if he's got time to stop by the gas station's restroom to shave off his beard because damn, every time he sets foot out of the car the heat outside makes him severely question his life choices. Still, the idea of hacking off the bulk of his hair over a filthy basin then shaving off the rest with a shitty store-bought disposable razor while he's sweating his balls off in a summer that's hotter than the surface of the sun maybe doesn't have the all-round appeal of just staying exactly where the fuck he is while Caulder pumps the gas. He stays where he is, rubbing the hair that covers his chin pseudo-thoughtfully.

There he is in the back seat and there's Drake next to him, his head resting back, asleep. Yeah, Drake. _That_ Drake. And hey, at least Hannibal thinks he's asleep. Sometimes it's kinda hard to tell. 

He thinks in a way how things've turned out makes a kind of sense. He thinks there's a kind of logic to it, or he tells himself there is. Three years ago, however, back when it all started off again, even he'd've agreed things were pretty fucked up. 

He's the king of that shit, so he ought to know.

\---

It started in a shitty warehouse in New York. Or it started while they were living in a shitty warehouse in New York, at least, if not, y'know, actually in the warehouse.

They'd been staying there with some of Abby's friends since a week or so after the debacle with Danica and Drake had gone down, though Hannibal guesses 'friends' might be too strong a term for what Abby's got. What she's got is a metric fuckton of acquaintances spread out all over the world, some of them due to her deadbeat, fancypants hunter of a dad and some just folks she's run into the way you do in their business, kicking a silver toe-spike into a bloodsucker's neck or y'know, whatever the frick it is the cool kids are doing these days. They'd been staying there maybe three weeks by the time it happened, all their shit still nailed up in crates they'd had some trucker guy haul long-distance, extra bucks for no questions asked. He missed Zoe. He missed Sommerfield and the guys, too, but at least Zoe was still alive even if she wasn't with them.

Hannibal was doing better then. He was doing pretty good, he thought: sometimes it didn't even feel like he'd been kicked in the tenders by several comically irate immortals, though he and Abby and Blade had shown 'em just how fucking flimsy then term 'immortal' really is. Sometimes it didn't feel like he'd had a shiny silver stake shoved into his chest, either, though he guessed it was better it'd happened after he'd been cured than before it. He was doing better enough that he took himself out to the movies one afternoon, some shitty pseudo-comedy matinee and a tub of half-stale popcorn that turned out to be a waste of a crisp new twenty, but it got him out of the shittily converted warehouse down by the river that even charitably speaking looked like the perfect venue for a meth lab. 

About forty minutes in, Hannibal felt the guy behind lean forward on the back of his seat. And okay, yeah, so maybe he should've cut and run right then, but he'd paid for that seat, goddamnit, and it wasn't like he was texting in the dark or some such legitimate theater-based irritation, so he held his ground stoically and he didn't turn. 

"Is this what passes for humor these days?" the guy said, just a few minutes later but they'd felt like they'd stretched into fucking infinity pretty much like the time he'd taken his high school girlfriend to the movies and her freaking dad had sat behind them the whole time, to make sure there was no funny business. But Hannibal knew that voice murmuring there by his ear, low so he wouldn't disturb the other movie-goers. Maybe it should've scared him a whole lot more than his high school girlfriend's dad had, but he's pretty sure if Drake had wanted him dead then he'd've been dead already; on the other hand, he _knew_ Jen's dad had wanted to beat him about the head with a nine iron. It'd sat right there by the door in his golf bag and the guy had eyed it every time he'd set foot on the premises like he was weighing up if he could claim justifiable homicide. 

"Yeah, you're not exactly the target demographic for the modern comedy, grandpa," Hannibal replied. And he had a gun in his leather jacket's inside pocket but fuck, he'd put his jacket down on the next seat so that wasn't good news. He glanced back over his shoulder and Drake was right there, ironically closer into kissing distance than his old high school girlfriend had ever been, or anyone he'd ever seen a movie with for that matter. Not that he was thinking about macking on Count Dracula. "What do you want, Drake? Can't you see I'm trying to watch a movie?"

"I've come to help you," Drake said, straightforward, like that made any kind of sense. 

"Well, you're actually distracting me," Hannibal replied, his heart fucking hammering, and he turned back toward the screen. "Y'know, most people consider that pretty much the opposite of help." 

Drake went quiet after that, and when Hannibal dared turn again, once he'd gotten his hand under his jacket and eased out his pistol full of UV rounds like they'd work on him anyway and not just kinda irritate him, the fucker was gone. After all the panic, it felt weirdly anticlimactic. 

It was a waste of money but he left after that, jogged outside and tried to spy the guy walking away in the afternoon sunlight though it was still pretty damn weird to think of a vampire strolling about in the sun - Blade didn't count. He wasn't in the street that he could see so he wandered in the alley and disturbed three rats behind a dumpster that came about a hair's breadth from getting a UV round in their tiny little heads 'cause apparently the whole thing had shaken Hannibal up. He was gone. And yeah, it was a waste of his not-particularly-hard-earned cash that he didn't go back into the movie. He went straight back to the warehouse. 

When he explained the situation, Caulder and Abby and the newer guys he'd been calling Bert and Ernie - he's pretty sure they were Bart and Arnie but they didn't complain even once - looked at him like he'd lost it. He couldn't say he blamed them.

"You're sure?" Abby asked. 

"April Fools!" he replied, with the fakest expression of delight that he could muster. Then he let his face drop completely flat, or at least the flat side of sardonic. "C'mon, it's not some shitty soap opera, I didn't wake up and oooh, look at that, it's just a dream. He was there. I'm sure." 

He had to say they didn't look convinced and he figured fuck them, fuck Drake, fuck vampire hunting. It wasn't even like he could go back to that yet anyway, wah wah petty grievances, he'd take his shit and go back to his room like he'd just reverted to being thirteen damn years old. He likes to think he was just frustrated 'cause he still wasn't at his best, his arm was stiff and he needed to train 'cause as it was, if he'd gone out with the team he'd probably've gotten his ass handed right back to him, please and thank you. That didn't mean he felt any better about it, though. 

Two days later, he was pretty sure he saw him walking down the street outside the pawn shop where was picking up a couple of really good new fake IDs. Two days after that, he thought he saw him on a laptop in a café across the street from a department store where he was picking up new threads for Abby since she refused to shop. Three days after that, he was in the park by the river just after dawn when Hannibal went out running, 'cause god _damn_ his stamina was shot. The guys looked pretty skeptical and okay, that made sense, they were pretty sure Drake was dead and Blade had pretty much confirmed that, when he was around, when he was contactable, when he actually bothered to pick up the damn phone. Apparently helping save his ass hadn't brought the Nightstalkers up in his estimation all that much, which seemed pretty rude to Hannibal, but hell, the guy seemed pretty rude all round. 

A couple of days after that, he stepped out to the market on the corner. He wandered around, up and down the aisles, past the canned goods and the chips and candy, squeezing fruit like it was going out of style. He'd picked up a carton of lychees just because he liked the way the name sounded when he said it, and was ticking off a list of the shit the guys said they needed - deodorant, toothpaste, shitty disposable razors, box of tampons, aspirin, two avocados though what the fuck they were for he had no idea - when suddenly there Drake was again, opposite him across the fruit displays. 

Hannibal had a basket in one hand and a goddamned avocado in the other like it was any use for anything but guacamole and he was pretty sure Drake wasn't looking for an invitation to Cookery with Hannibal King, though fuck knew what it was he actually wanted. Drake picked up a strawberry and sniffed at it and Hannibal wondered if he could get to the gun in his pocket before Drake could leap over the celery and tear his throat out with his teeth. He probably couldn't. Considering all the other people there in the store, drifting up and down the aisles like the living dead needed coconut milk and anti-dandruff shampoo, he guessed it wasn't worth it to go for it.

"If you're not gonna buy that, maybe put it down before it gets vampire cooties," Hannibal said. 

"I don't have cooties," Drake replied, looking vaguely disdainful while still holding the strawberry in his hand. He glanced down at it then back up at Hannibal. "And vampirism doesn't generally transfer well via fruit."

"Obviously you're unfamiliar with _Attack of the Killer Tomatoes_ ," Hannibal muttered, avocado still in hand. "Look, I don't have time for this. I've got a kid with toothache, a menstruating woman and a guy who's just gotta have these fucking avocados _right now_ waiting for me at home. If you're planning to kill me, just get it over with."

Drake tilted his head at him curiously. "I'm not planning to kill you," he said. "As I told you last time, I want to help you." He put down the strawberry and raised his hands up by his shoulders. "Feel free to take the gun from your jacket if you don't believe me. Though I suspect that would just cause widespread panic." 

Hannibal sighed. "Put your hands down, for Christ's sake," he said, shaking his head, and frowned at a woman passing by who eyed the two of them oddly before he turned back to Drake. "Okay, I'll bite." Drake raised his brows. "Not like that, jeez. You want to help us how?" 

But then an gray-haired lady in a pair of cartoon big-ass glasses rammed his ankle with her shopping cart and once he was done apologizing for somehow being in her way, even though he'd not moved in at least a few minutes and she could've just, y'know, gone around, he looked up and Drake was gone. Motherfucker. 

He paid for his shit and then got the fuck out of there. And there, outside, plain as day, face down on the sidewalk with Abby twisting his arms up against his back, was Drake. Oh well, at least it turned out she'd listened. Oh well, at least it turned out he wasn't losing his goddamn mind. 

She looked at him as they hauled the dude up into the back of the van. He sighed. He got in with them.

\---

Hannibal's always been pretty surprised just how little attention people pay to abduction in broad daylight. In his experience, they're pretty alarmingly blasé about it. Okay, so it helps that when the Nightstalkers do it they flash fake police badges and pretend like it's official business, and they try to keep it to a minimum, or at least keep it to deserted parking lots in crappy areas well after dark. Picking up Drake, however, was two o'clock in the afternoon and everyone nearby just walked on by. He went pretty easily, considering. Hannibal had to wonder if there was a reason for that. 

"Is there a reason we're not killing him?" Bert asked, as they manhandled his semi-conscious body down into the warehouse basement. 

"Daystar," Ernie replied. "We can use his blood to activate it."

"And then it's sayonara vampires," Hannibal said. And they hauled Drake up, pulled up his arms and hooked his handcuffs over a meathook there dangling from the ceiling. Such were the benefits of inhabiting derelict meat-packing plants, apparently. He hung there, semi-conscious, the toes of his boots barely scraping the floor but that was pretty much deliberate. It looked uncomfortable. That was pretty much deliberate, too. 

They pointed a camera at him up in the corner of the room so the tech girl, Emma, Em, the Emster, could get her super-cool security system to keep an eye on him. The place might've looked like a steaming pile of crap from the outside but inside the guys had done some pretty damn funky stuff - there were cameras everywhere except the bedrooms and the bathrooms (and Hannibal had his suspicions about those, too), there was a fully operational medical bay, a fully armed armory, a science lab that looked like a biologist's wet dream. There was a training room complete with gym where Hannibal had been thinking about shooting the damn punchbag for weeks by then, and a kitchen-diner by the living space that was the size of his whole college apartment. Maybe it looked like hell, worn around the edges, but hey, the last place they'd called home had been pretty shitty, too, and not even half as well stocked.

They pointed a camera at Drake and they left him there with his hands cuffed above his head and a big-ass chain locked around his ankles and for a couple of hours they all sat by Em's security station by the living area and tried not to keep on looking at the monitor over and over and over again. Drake barely moved the whole time, lifted his head a couple of times so they could tell he was conscious but he didn't even try to free himself and Hannibal found that pretty fucking weird if he said so himself. And he said so, repeatedly, while Bert and Ernie fought over the TV remote and Abby cleaned her guns at the kitchen table. And then, later on, Abby and Bert and Ernie headed out to do a little hunting and Hannibal sat with Em as she brought up maps and hacked security systems like a pro. It was like watching a freaking heist movie, seeing her in action, but he kept glancing back across at the cam trained on Drake. He'd still barely moved. The alarm hadn't sounded. 

They left him there for two days before anyone even addressed the goddamn elephant in the room, dangling like a fish at the end of a line. Then Ernie, their scientist, crazy Ernie with the ideas about Daystar who hunted at night with the rest of them because apparently great hair and washboard abs and a fucking PhD in Biochemistry weren't enough already, started futzing in the lab. 

"Look, someone needs to go in there and draw some blood," Ernie told them, gesturing at the monitor from the dinner table. They'd turned the screen around so they could all keep on glancing at it even though, hell, they'd been tiptoeing around the fact that he was even there since they'd hauled his bloodsucking ass into the basement. 

Abby suggested they shoot him with another arrow; Ernie said he needed blood in a bag, not blood in a sample of Daystar. Bert suggested they shoot the fucker in the head and draw blood after; Ernie pointed out that great though that sounded - two birds with one stone - they actually needed him alive if they were going to get enough blood out of him over time, bit by bit, to kill all the vampires and not just some of them. Em kept her mouth shut, which seemed pretty smart under the circumstances. Hannibal dropped his forehead down against the table and groaned. 

"Jesus Christ, I'll do it," he said. "But you'd better be covering my ass 'cause I'll be really pissed off if he eats me."

Ernie gave him a tourniquet and a blood bag with a needle. He went into the room. They locked the door behind him, just in case. Drake opened his eyes and looked at him. Hannibal clenched his jaw. 

Drake was wearing a shirt with buttons at the cuffs so Hannibal reached up and cut it with his pocket knife, left part of the left sleeve dangling from Drake's wrist and half of it slipping down around his bicep. Drake's skin was warm when he wrapped the tourniquet around his arm, not that he'd expected any different - a couple of nights with Danica had dispelled all illusions he might've had about creepy dead things with no pulse and no breath and no reflection in the mirror - but Drake's skin was _warm_ , like he wasn't a monster at all. He pushed in the needle and taped it there and Drake watched him as he watched the tube fill up red and start to trickle into the bag. It'd take five to ten minutes to get a unit out of him, so he stood there and he waited, feeling Drake's blood filling up the bag, feeling how fucking hot it was in his hands. Damn, that was creepy. Yet another reason he'd walked out of med school.

He waited. It felt like a goddamn age as the bag filled up and he stood there like the world's worst pseudo-doctor bleeding a patient like they'd taken a trip back to the Middle Ages. All they needed was a bowl of leeches and some shitty reference to Hippocrates to really complete the look, he thought, restless, pretty damn anxious and he thought he had a hell of an excuse for that, standing less than a foot away from the progenitor of the whole vampire race. But Drake didn't move except to breathe in and out, just hung there and watched him, closely, intently. Hannibal didn't look at him. He looked at his blood instead. 

When it was over, he pulled out the needle and stuck a Scooby Doo band-aid that they'd bought for Zoe before she'd gone to live with her dad somewhere in Nevada over the pinprick in the crook of his arm. Then he left. He took a deep fucking breath and let it out in a huff as he handed over the bag. 

"I am _not_ doing that shit again," he said. Except three nights later, he did. 

He trained with Abby in the day and he felt better, he felt good, good enough that he went out with the team that night and didn't get his butt kicked. He ached like a motherfucker afterwards, but for some ridiculous goddamn reason he couldn't wipe the smile off his face as they drove back, as they shelved their gear, as he swung by the security station and took a look to see if the situation had changed at all. It hadn't: Drake was hanging there in his cut up shirt, and maybe that was what finally shut down his smile. They had a vampire locked up in the basement. That shit just wasn't kosher. 

After that, they figured they'd rotate him with Ernie and some nights the scientist guy could go back to actual scientist shit. He needed more blood for tests, he said, though what the fuck he'd done with the first unit who knew. Hannibal grumbled to himself as he went back in there and Drake looked at him, narrowed his eyes at Hannibal's bruised face. 

"Lucky punch," he said, not that Drake would give a frosted fuck about that. Then he tied off his arm and pulled off the band-aid they'd left there since last time and he jabbed him again. He bled him again. And three nights later, the same thing. Two nights after that, the same. And after every time, the son of a bitch started looking worse, got pale, got fucking ashen as he hung there, limp, barely even raising his head. They started taking smaller amounts after the first few times, just a hypodermic full, but Ernie still needed more and more so that meant Hannibal was in there every second or third night, finding a vein in Drake's arm to bleed him from. 

Two weeks passed, three, a month, two, three. They ran out of the damn cartoon band-aids so Hannibal went out and bought a new box, Hello Kitty this time 'cause that was just the cherry on the top of the damn surreal situation. And the son of a bitch started looking gray enough and limp enough to be a zombie, let alone a vampire. Hannibal knew it had to stop. It was fucking absurd. He kept telling himself so. He kept telling Drake so, though eventually he barely even opened his eyes at all. Why the hell he hadn't just shapeshifted into that huge-ass fucking demon and torn his way out through them Hannibal had no idea. Ernie said his blood looked normal - vampire normal - but that meant pretty much less than nothing. They didn't even know why Daystar hadn't killed him like it had the others, after all. The guessed for the same reason it hadn't killed Blade, but they didn't know for sure because they didn't even know why that was.

"Look, it'll kill him if we keep this up," he told the guys as he handed over the bag one night, sometime in the third month when summer was creeping into fall. "There's a reason you don't donate blood more than every couple of months, and that's real people who eat and drink and conjure up their own damn hemoglobin. And he hasn't--" He winced. "-- _eaten_ since he got here. He's going to die. I thought the point was to keep him alive, not go fucking Mengele on him." 

Abby frowned at him. "You're saying you want to feed him?" she asked, as close to incredulous as she ever seemed to get. 

"We could find some rats or something. A stray dog." 

"This isn't an Anne Rice novel," Ernie pointed out. "You know it pretty much needs to be human." 

"So we borrow from a blood bank." 

"Yeah, and you know blood reserves aren't exactly at an all time high," Ernie said.

"And I'm not breaking into a blood bank to feed a vampire," Abby added. 

Hannibal sighed. He shook his head. That being the case, and that was the case, there was only one solution. There was no way they could get a batch of Blade's serum there in time, or whip some up in the lab. There was no way to know if it'd work even if they had. There was _one_ solution.

"I'm going to fucking regret this," he said. He really, really was.

\---

Drake looked at him as he let him down, as he got up onto a chair and locked a chain to the cuffs, as he went across the room and locked it to a big-ass steel loop they'd bolted into the wall like their lives depended on it. As he let him down, Drake's knees buckling under him as he went down to the floor for the first time in more than three months, Hannibal guessed maybe they did. He had to be pissed. They hadn't exactly rolled out the red carpet. 

"Don't make me shoot you," Hannibal said. "Really. Don't think this pretty face means I won't." Then he set the chair against the wall by the locked door and he sat down on it. He drew his gun from its holster at his hip and he thumbed off the safety and he aimed it; the chains at Drake's wrists and ankles wouldn't reach the door, sure, but that was only if they held. Then he tossed the bag full of blood onto the floor there in front of him. 

For a minute, Drake didn't even move. He just lay there on his side, motionless except for the shallow rise and fall of his chest under his shirt. He looked like hell, Hannibal had to admit - hair had started to grow in over his scalp and his jaw till it looked like they'd accidentally dragged some homeless guy in off the streets instead of the king of the damn vampires. But then he shifted, made a noise that was maybe a groan but far from a word in any language Hannibal knew of, and his fingers inched out toward the bag across the floor. He dragged it closer with a damn tenuous grip on one corner, dragged it right up to his mouth as his head rested there on the cement and Hannibal watched as he bit down through the plastic, like even that was hard. He watched him suck at it, draining it bit by bit, minute by minute, like he was lying parched in a desert and sipping at a water flask, not on a basement floor with a bag of blood. 

It took fifteen minutes for him to get through it, nearly twenty. Then he fell down onto his back with blood in his scruffy beard and took a long, deep breath, then another, then another. As he breathed it out for the tenth time, maybe the eleventh, he turned his head. He opened his eyes, and he looked straight across the room at Hannibal. 

"That was your blood," he said. It was the first time he'd spoken since they'd brought him there. His voice was half-broken and brittle, the way a dead thing might speak. Hannibal guessed it might've been better for him if he had been.

Hannibal nodded tightly. "Yeah," he said, rubbing at the Hello Kitty band-aid on the inside of his elbow, hidden underneath the sleeve of his shirt. Yeah, it was his blood.

"Thank you." 

"Well, we need you alive, what was I meant to do?" 

Drake chuckled drily, wryly. "Thank you anyway," he said, and then he closed his eyes again, and Hannibal stood up, unsteady, and he knocked at the door, knocked again, knocked _again_ because in that particular moment he couldn't've gotten out of there fast enough. As he'd sat there in the med bay and jabbed the needle into his own damn arm he'd told himself it was nothing, it wasn't even like it was the first time a vampire had drunk his blood. It didn't matter, it was just his freakish biology, it was like serving the guy a three course dinner, impersonal like a restaurant waiter. 

But Jesus, it'd felt personal, sitting there watching him drink. It felt like the first time with Danica, when she'd bit him and sucked, and when Emma unlocked the door he was out of there like a bullet from a gun, pushing past her, running, sprinting down the corridor so he could heave his entire last meal up into the john. He was shaking. Fuck, he was shaking like a leaf. He didn't go out with the team that night. It wasn't his turn but Jesus, even if it had been, fuck knew what he might've done. He took a sleeping pill washed down with three mouthfuls of vodka and he slept instead, and didn't dream. 

When he glanced at the monitor at breakfast in the morning, he had to admit Drake looked better. He'd shifted himself up against the back wall and he was sitting there under the shitty fluorescent lights with his back pressed up against the bricks, his head in his chained hands. Later on, Hannibal unlocked the door and he went inside; Drake looked up and his mouth twisted wryly as he dragged up his sleeve with his opposite hand and bared the crook of his arm. Maybe Hannibal should've had him come forward to meet him at the extent of his chains instead of stepping right on into striking distance, but he didn't. He walked straight over there and went down on his knees on the dusty-ass floor and he rubbed at the inside of Drake's bared arm with his thumb. He wrapped the tourniquet around and pulled it tight and Drake watched him do it, his warm breath tickling the side of Hannibal's neck. Once he'd filled the required syringe, once he'd set it down on a little metal tray, Hannibal sat back on his heels and he looked right back at him. 

"How do you feel?" he asked, pressing his fingers to the pulse in the side of Drake's neck, like he was actually a doctor and not just a med school dropout. To be totally fair, to be totally frank, he was the closest they had to it there in their warehouse base. 

"Better," Drake said, and his voice sounded better, his skin looked better, less pallid, less gray. 

Hannibal nodded and shifted his hand from Drake's neck. His pulse was strong but Christ that was odd, feeling at a vampire's blood vessels with his fingertips. He wiped them off on his dusty cargo pants. He rocked back on his heels and pushed back up to his feet. 

"Good," he said. "Just don't think there's a lot more coming your way. I like my blood where it is." 

Drake rested his head back against the brick wall and looked up at him. "I understand," he said. He really looked like he did. 

Eight nights later when Hannibal was stripped to the waist with a damn needle in his arm again, Abby stood there in the med bay doorway and frowned at him across the room. 

"You're feeding him again," she said. "I don't get it. What if he gets stronger and he breaks out, have you thought of that?"

"Because you're all coming up with such great alternatives," he replied. "Besides, don't you think he'd've broken out by now if he wanted to? Those first few days, he wasn't exactly weak. He could've changed and fucked us all up before we had time to lift a finger." 

"So you're saying you trust him now?" 

"That's not even close to what I said."

"You keep on going straight up to him in there. You think he wouldn't kill you in a heartbeat?"

"Like he's done so far?" 

"And you think he's not just toying with you? You don't think he has that kind of patience?" Abby shook her head. "He's thousands of years old, King. If anyone knows about playing the long game, it's him."

Hannibal sighed. "You all keep saying we need him alive but it sounds to me pretty much like you want him dead," he said. "I don't really give a damn either way but for the love of Pete, make up your damn mind. In the meantime, I'll be doing what I need to do."

Though fuck, as he popped the vacutainer into place and watched his blood drain out, he couldn't say he liked it, either. The first batch of serum they'd requested from HQ had been needed for Blade after some kind of incident. The second wouldn't even be ready for another week, let alone actually arriving; they'd be gone before they could feasibly expect delivery so this was what they had. No one was exactly in a hurry. Hannibal was pretty sure they'd just kill the guy when they'd gotten what they wanted anyway.

Abby sighed and walked away like she wanted to argue the point except she knew he was right and he set his jaw, irritable, uncomfortable, fucking unsettled, as he removed the needle and stuck another Hello Kitty band-aid over the puncture. Jesus, much more and he'd start to look like a junkie. 

He poured the blood out into a shot glass, like that was classier than a vacutainer somehow. Drake looked up when he came into the room, eyed the glass in Hannibal's hand as he walked across the room. He sat down next to him against the wall. He passed him the glass. They were looking at each other sidelong as Drake drank, as Drake licked Hannibal's blood off his lips and sucked it off his teeth.

"Yours again," Drake said. 

Hannibal tugged up the sleeve of his shirt to show off the band-aid there in the crook of his arm that matched the one on each of Drake's because the only way his veins had kept up was to use both arms. "Mine again." 

Drake shifted; Hannibal flinched; Drake went still, like a cowboy with a skittish horse, and slowly rested one warm, cuffed hand down over the band-aid on Hannibal's arm. 

"Thank you," he said, the pad of one thumb rubbing faintly at the needlestick site in Hannibal's arm. "I didn't expect to live this long after capture." 

Hannibal smiled wryly. "Don't thank me," he said. "HQ's called us in. You might wish you'd died after all."

\---

They flew out to Nevada three days later, or at least Hannibal and Abby did. They passed their replacements in the parking lot outside while Bert and Ernie and Emma loitered in the warehouse door and waved goodbye. That was the life, Hannibal guessed, always moving on.

The plane was pretty cool, a private jet like something Hannibal imagined big-shot corporate types jerking around on, all leather seats and complimentary drinks and a flirty male flight attendant who Hannibal could've eaten up with a spoon given half a chance. He grimaced at himself over his gin instead then nodded off with his mouth wide open. He guessed at least he didn't drool. The only problem was he dreamed about Drake, about Drake's hands on his skin, about straddling Drake's thighs as he drew his blood and that shit did _not_ need eroticizing in his head. 

When he woke up as the plane touched down in Vegas, he groaned and rested his forehead down on the table and for a second, maybe more than a second, he wondered if it was some creepy-ass vampire thing, like Drake drinking his blood had gotten him into his head somehow. Except logically he knew that was just so much bullshit - he still had creepy sex dreams about Danica sometimes but that wasn't biological, it had nothing to do with her biting him and sucking his fucking blood. Even if he hadn't been cured, he thinks, looking back with the benefit of hindsight, it doesn't work like that - it's a virus, a weird one but still a virus when it comes down to it, and it's not like he dreams about the jackasses on public transit who give him colds. 

They disembarked as the crew started to unload the hold and he knew Drake was in there, in chains, in a cage, awaiting transport. He hadn't had the benefit of leather seats and a flirty attendant. All Drake had was a God-almighty idiot dreaming about his teeth in his neck like he hadn't been hanging from a basement ceiling for nearly four months without so much as a shower or a shave and man, Hannibal hadn't needed that. He really hadn't needed that. 

It turned out vampire hunter HQ was underneath a huge-ass freaking casino. Two vans picked them up from the private airfield and whisked them all away; they went in through a service entrance and took an elevator down to the basement, followed their driver down a corridor, down a goddamn labyrinth of corridors with swipe card locks on doors that blocked their way every now and then, so twisty and turny Hannibal half expected they'd turn a corner and spy the Goblin City, then they turned into a supply closet. Sneaky damn casino guys had a shelving unit in there that opened out on hinges and there was a big steel door behind it with a biometric scanner and the driver got them all through into another elevator, shiny and brightly lit, that went down and down and freaking _down_ till it started to feel like Voyage to the Center of the Earth. There was a security desk at the bottom when they finally got out with three armed guards sitting there behind it who clearly meant business. A gray-haired guy in a suit that looked like it'd cost more than their entire base back in New York greeted them with a warm smile and an extended hand that they each shook in turn. 

"Max Sommerfield," he said. "Let me show you around." So they followed him. 

"Zoe's dad?" Hannibal asked under his breath, elbowing Abby in the ribs. 

"Zoe's grandfather," Abby replied. "Her dad's their lead scientist. I'm pretty sure this place is how they met."

Hannibal guessed that explained a lot. 

They wandered the corridors of the strange underground complex, following Sommerfield Senior's lead. He showed them their three labs, all bright white lights and shiny metal surfaces and state-of-the-art equipment that made their warehouse in New York look like a shanty in comparison. He showed them the training facilities, the armory, the library, the kitchens. There were four locked doors branching off of the end of a corridor and he explained they went through into the living quarters: the team of twenty specialist on-site guards had one, the Vegas hunters had the next door and the science team had the third, with the fourth leading into what was still pretty much a construction site for more rooms, for the boss and his family. He handed each of them a card. They were set to join the science team, which was pretty much for the best since from what Hannibal knew, the Vegas hunters liked to take every little thing as an opportunity for a pissing contest. 

They had a room each, at the far end of the corridor, past the kitchenette, past the bathrooms and the scientists' rooms, like an annexe behind yet another locked door. There were four rooms in there, one for Abby and one for him, and when they'd stowed their shit and wandered back out to the living quarters, they got who one of the others was for, at least: Zoe bounded up to the two of them and Hannibal swept her up off of her feet while a guy he suspected must be her dad looked on, amused. 

"Hey, shrimp," he said, ruffling her hair, and Zoe gave him a look that said she was most definitely not a shrimp while Abby looked just as amused as Sommerfield Jr. did. He let her down. She was definitely pleased to see them. 

They took some time to settle in after that, kicked back for a couple of hours on the couch, talked to Zoe and her dad while her granddad made himself scarce. Her dad's name was Jack but apparently everyone just called him Sommerfield and that was pretty weird, considering they'd known someone else by exactly that name and hell, Hannibal hadn't even known she was married. Turned out his dad was some superstar casino owner, megabucks, financed the entire hunting op for most of the country, not that they had a whole lot of recruits. Turned out his first kid, a daughter, had been turned just before her eighteenth birthday. Turned out the vamps had killed his wife, while the two guys had been away on a fishing trip. He guessed he saw what'd driven it all after that. 

Sommerfield wandered back to work and they grabbed some food, ate in the living space at a table with Zoe while she told them all about the people they'd be living with. It sounded like there were six full-time scientists under her dad, and Hannibal figured he'd learn their names as they went along. And sometime after nine - maybe, Hannibal wasn't totally sure he'd changed his wristwatch the right way - Sommerfield came back. 

"We think your guy in New York got the formula right for wider Daystar distribution," he told them, taking a seat with them on the disconcertingly white couch. Everything was just so damn clean there, like no one lived there at all or at least like they had the best damn cleaning team the world had ever known. "We'll be working on a way to stabilize it for transport so we can get batches out around the world. We can't believe you actually caught him, y'know? Dracula. The progenitor. It's incredible." 

"You're gonna hold him here?" Hannibal asked. 

Sommerfield nodded. "That's the plan. Of course, no one wants to go anywhere near him. He's not your average vampire. So far we can't even get him out of the cage." 

Abby looked at him. Hannibal looked at Abby. She sighed. 

"I can do that," Hannibal said. "Take me to him."

Sommerfield took him there, winding through the corridors to another locked door and inside there was a woman at a computer console behind two-way glass watching monitors showing six different camera angles on the same damn thing: Drake in a cage in the middle of the room. It was long and narrow and Drake was locked in there so tightly he could barely move at all, his hands and ankles shackled to the bars, a chain around his neck and round his waist, tipped down on his back on the floor. It didn't exactly look comfortable. Hannibal guessed that wasn't exactly the point. 

"Keys," he said, and held out one hand. The woman at the desk handed them to him and buzzed him in through the door, into a kind of vestibule that he guessed was a security precaution. The door locked behind him and the next door opened in front of him and he went inside. 

Drake watched him as best he could as he unlocked the six separate locks at the cage door, as he drew back six separate fucking crazy-huge bolts. There was a chain there hanging from the ceiling that he was meant to attached to a metal collar they'd fucking welded on around his neck so he did that, his fingers fumbling at the back of Drake's neck while he imagined the poor woman at the other side of the mirrored window gaping at the fact he'd gotten in so close to him. Then he unlocked the chain at Drake's waist, unlocked the chain around his neck, unshackled his ankles one by one, unshackled his wrists one by one and stood there, leaned over, and offered him a hand. Drake took it. He hauled him up to his feet, thankfully with a little help 'cause the guy was _not_ light, and wound up practically nose to nose and hand in hand. 

"So, this is where you're keeping me now," Drake said. 

"Hey, I'm not the one who's keeping you," Hannibal replied. He stepped back and tripped on the discarded chains; Drake caught him by the shoulders in a flash, more quickly than Hannibal had even managed to see, and steadied him. There they were, close again, Drake's hands on him, and fuck he didn't need to remember his dumbass in-flight sex dream right at that precise moment while Drake was looking at him so damn intently. Fortunately, he was saved by the crackle of a speaker.

"Bolt him down now, Mr. King," the woman said from behind the glass. He turned to the mirror and scowled briefly as he nodded, and gestured to the contraption there across the room that looked like nothing on earth so much as the couch you'd always see in prison execution sequences in movies, or like when villains strapped the secret agent down in their secret lair for lasers and circular saws, arms spread wide. Drake gave him a brief wry smile and then he walked over to it, seemingly willingly. He lay down on it. Hannibal strapped him down. 

"Thanks for not making this hard," he told him. 

Drake just looked up at him steadily. "I told you I wanted to help," he said.

\---

He slept in a bed that didn't feel like his that night and woke in the morning to a room without sunlight. It was almost like being back with Danica, except she was dead and he'd been cured.

The science team had him draw a couple of vacutainers full of blood after breakfast and he apologized as he did it, sighed as he tightened the tourniquet and the band-aid he stuck in place was that kind of pinkish color that's never close to skin tone. So much for Hello Kitty or Scooby fucking Doo. He went into the vestibule and handed the samples to a scientist at the other side, then he went back in. Drake looked surprised. Hannibal was pretty damn surprised, too, sitting himself down on the floor against the wall at the opposite side of the room with the remote for the Drake's tilty couch in his hand. He tilted him upright with a buzz of the motors. 

"You said you wanted to help," he said. "Did you mean you actually want to render aid like some kind of vampire good samaritan? I don't get it. What's 'help' in this context?"

Drake took a deep breath and sighed it out slowly as he watched him across the room. "My people are ridiculous," he said, in the end. "Caricatures of what they used to be, capes and fangs and angst. I've found people are more likely to invite me to fuck them when I say I'm a vampire than they are to scream, until they see what I am. I had a man in New York, I think you'd call him a goth. He had black polish on his nails and he told me vampires are cool. When I fucked him he said he liked my scar. It used to mean something." He shook his head. "I hoped they'd find their way while I was gone but they've only changed for the worse. You've seen them. Tell me you don't think that's true."

Hannibal raised his brows. "They turned out shitty so you want to kill them all?"

"Something like that, yes."

"And I'm meant to believe you?"

"Don't you?"

"You tried to kill me."

"I tried to incapacitate you," Drake replied. "Are you telling me that worked?"

"Well, no." Hannibal frowned. "But you did kill my team. You killed Sommerfield and Hedges and Dex and you took Zoe and me captive. Are you saying you didn't?"

"No, that was me."

"But you expect me to trust you anyway?"

"No, not especially."

"So what do you want?"

"From what I found out about your virus, it's about what _you_ want," Drake said. "My blood. I thought I'd give it to you."

Hannibal's frown deepened. His stomach sank. He rubbed at his mouth and the beard over his jaw with one hand as he looked at him there, strapped to the bench. "Fuck," he said. "You're here by choice."

"Yes."

"You're a fucking lunatic."

He shook his head, rubbed at his face, not quite sure what the hell to make of any of it, no clue if it was true or an interestingly construed pack of lies. Maybe Abby was right and the son of a bitch was unraveling some glorious long con, trying to trick him into believing, but why the fuck do that? Hannibal wasn't a total dumbass, actually had a brain rattling around in his head somewhere even if it didn't exactly get a whole lot of extensive use these days when his main pastimes were shooting guns, kicking ass and drawing blood from a vampire. But he couldn't see a way that it made sense for him to tell those particular lies. Abby would've said there was a plan, he just couldn't see it. He wasn't sure. 

"So, why me?" he asked. "Why'd you come to me and not Abby or Blade?"

"Blade would have tried to kill me," Drake said. "So would you friend Abigail. And you know what it's like."

"What what's like?"

"Having something and losing it." Drake paused. "Having power and losing it." 

"I don't know what you're saying." 

"I can't change," Drake said. "Your virus took that away from me. This body is all that I have." 

"Bullshit." Hannibal picked himself up off of the floor. "Bullshit you can't change. Jesus Christ." He banged on the door and heard the faint beep of the lock releasing. He left. But as he left, he couldn't help but wonder if Drake wasn't telling the truth; maybe Daystar had taken something from Drake the way the cure had taken something out of him. He didn't want it back, hell no, because he'd never wanted it in the first place, but that didn't mean he didn't feel the loss; he missed the strength, missed how fucking invincible he'd felt, how nothing could hurt him like he was the star of some shitty superhero movie. What he didn't miss was the bloodlust. 

As he left, he couldn't help but wonder if Drake wasn't lying at all, and never had. Maybe he'd come to the right guy after all.

He avoided the room the next day and trained with Abby in the gym. A couple of the Vegas team were in there and came over, challenged them; Abby took hers down in twenty seconds, pressed him face-first to the mat and twisted his arm up tight behind his back - any more and it'd've broken, or at least popped his shoulder from the socket. Hannibal took a different tack and got the guy so irate with verbal jabs that in the end he could barely see straight; he faked right, went left, lifted his knee into the guy's gut and sent him sprawling. The first guy tried pretty damn hard to blindside Abby after but his partner caught his wrist; their team leader was nearby, looking a great combination of impressed and amused and pissed at his team as they grumbled their way across the room to lick their wounds. 

"You guys should come out with us sometime," the guy said, and introduced himself as Hamilton with a handshake hard enough to give a guy carpal tunnel. They said they'd take them up on the offer just as soon as they got clearance. After all, pretty much nada happened in Vegas without Sommerfield Sr.'s say-so.

He avoided the room the day after that and kidded around with Zoe for a while before her tutor arrived and her homeschool schedule started. Hannibal wandered off into the armory and looked over the weapons, picked out a couple of guns and took them for a spin in the firing range. One of the guys from the gym was in there already and gave him a pretty good run for his money. When Hannibal held out his hand the guy shook it, introduced himself as Greer. His asshole partner was Bannerman, he said, and the guy really didn't grow on you. That sounded like hunters. They'd never been the most sociable of guys.

The avoided the room the day after that, too, at least till after lunch and after forty minutes on a treadmill feeling like he was going totally, irredeemably nuts. Then he got a call from Sommerfield that they needed more blood and somehow, like it made any goddamn sense, that had continued to be his job even though they had a whole damn team of actual honest-to-God doctors and biological scientists to do that shit. He went in, still sweaty from his run with a towel around his neck, and Drake looked at him. They hadn't even moved him since the last time he'd been there. 

He drew blood and didn't say a word, passed it through the door on a tray, swapped it for a newly-produced dispenser full of Blade's serum and went back inside. 

"I'm going to put this in your mouth," Hannibal said. "Bite down."

Drake didn't even ask what it was, just opened his mouth. He bit down and the serum dispersed and when it was empty, Hannibal took the dispenser unit back and _then_ he told him what it was - Blade's serum, the blood substitute. If it worked, he wouldn't need to keep on opening his goddamn veins. 

As it happened, it worked. It didn't work _well_ \- all they could spare was one per day and even that was apparently pushing the limits of their capabilities and Drake would've needed a couple at least to keep his blood production up with the rate they removed it. Hannibal went in every morning for two weeks to take one to him and to take it away again after. He went in again later every two or three days to take blood. It was better than nothing but hell, even for Blade it only worked a quarter as well as real blood did. 

After the first couple of weeks, after training and a couple of meals with the Vegas hunters, after Abby handing all those guys their asses in pretty definitive style, Sommerfield Sr gave the go-ahead for the two of them to go out with the crew. They spent a couple of nights getting acclimatized - they hadn't even left the damn underground complex that was like something out of a postapocalyptic dystopia of the highest order since they'd arrived, and breathing city air felt pretty weird, not to mention seeing sky and cars and people and all the bright, flashing lights of Las Vegas. Turned out they all worked together pretty well, despite Bannerman's aversion to newbies. That was pretty good news. 

And every night Hannibal went back to his room in the science wing and he thought about Drake strapped to that damn bench in the lab where no one ever went but him. He thought about everything he'd said, about wanting to help them, about how damn easy it'd been to take him in that day, about how he'd never once tried to escape, hadn't even yanked his goddamn chains. Every time Hannibal drew blood Drake got a little weaker, and he was letting him do it. And all Hannibal could think of once he gave up on some trashy crime novel from the library and turned off the lamp by his bed was Drake's hands, and his mouth, and the points of his teeth, what they'd feel like, what that body he was stuck in looked like under the dirty clothes and the greasy hair. Maybe he didn't sweat the way a human would, but it wasn't like vampires couldn't use a shower every now and then. 

He told himself that was why he did it - the fact that it'd been a hell of a stretch since the guy had even seen water, let alone soap, and if he had to keep on going in there then he needed to be clean at the very least. He had no idea if vampires could get infections but hell, if they could then that was a problem right there. So, one morning in the third week, he packed a bag full of shit and he went to the lab. 

"Turn off the cameras," he told her. She frowned at him. "Look, you know I'm in charge of what happens in there. I'm not going to put a stake in his chest. He can't break out. Turn 'em off." She frowned at him again, which was pretty impressive since she hadn't really stopped frowning the first time. Then she turned off the cameras, one by one. "Thanks. Now, keep them off till I get back out. If I need you, you'll know 'cause I'll be screaming _no, no, the vampire's got me!_ "

She didn't look amused. He shrugged and buzzed himself in through the first door; she buzzed him through the second. 

He told himself it was for sensible, intelligent reasons as he went over to Drake and unstrapped him from the bench. He told himself it was actually in their best interests as he gave him his daily dose of the serum and then set the dispenser unit aside, and he let him stand, albeit shakily. Drake stretched and several joints in there popped. He looked pale. With so many blood draws under his belt, Hannibal guessed that was to be expected. 

"You really need a shower," he told him. " _Really_. Trust me. I'm doing us both a favor here." And he steered him toward the odd little wet room at the far side of the room that'd maybe been designed for decontamination or some such bullshit, but he'd verified in advance that the thing still worked. 

Drake was too weak for much apart from holding himself upright, a combination of the repeated draining and being left strapped that way for weeks on end, and Hannibal couldn't help but feel kinda guilty for that. He'd assumed it was someone else's job, like a total fuckwit, till he'd enquired with Sommerfield who'd enquired with his dad and there it was: care and maintenance of the subject was entirely in the hands of Hannibal King. He unbuttoned Drake's cut-up shirt while Drake leaned back against the wall. He went down on his knees and helped him out of boots and socks, unbuckled his belt while he was down there then came back up to pop open the button at his waist and get him out of his pants. It was meant to be impersonal, sure, but the needle marks that hadn't fully healed in Drake's arms felt pretty damn personal because Hannibal was the one who'd put them there. It felt pretty damn personal because there Drake was, naked, and some damned preternatural force had to be working on his side because all the bulk of his muscle hadn't diminished one bit. Drake just let him undress him. He didn't say a word.

The wet room was pretty much at the far extent of the chain at Drake's neck and some intrepid soul had ventured in and welded the goddamn chain to the ring around Drake's neck. It pulled pretty tight but Drake didn't seem to pay that much attention, just let himself be guided into the shower once the water was running and leaned forward there with his hands against the wall, letting it run over his skin. Hannibal sighed and shook his head and pulled off his shirt. Drake looked at him, Drake watched him strip, and didn't say a word. 

He washed him. He fished a washcloth from the bag that he'd brought in and he washed him with it, head to toe, scrubbed him down over his arms and his back and and his neck and his chest and Drake let him. Drake turned when he asked him to, ducking under the chain, lifted an arm or a leg when he asked him to though Hannibal had to hold them in place once they got there he was so damn weak. He shampooed the guy's hair and washed it out, cleaned his face and the beard that'd been growing in for months, ran the cloth down his chest and paused for a second before he ran it lower, trying to be clinical, trying to remember what he'd been taught about patient exams as he was basically squeezing Drake's balls with his hand with just a washcloth preventing skin contacting skin. He ran the cloth behind, across his perineum, ran it forward and eased back his foreskin, circled there lightly and Drake took a sharp breath. Hannibal felt Drake's cock give a faint, weak jerk in his hand. And for one dizzying, terrifying moment, Drake leaned forward and pressed his mouth to his. He pushed him back. 

"Don't get ideas," Hannibal told him, though his voice didn't sound so sure. "Do I look like the kind of guy that puts out on the first date?" 

Drake raised his brows in response, almost smirking. Hannibal laughed. It was fucking ridiculous. 

He dried him off after, patted him down with a towel he'd brought with him then did himself, dressed himself, then pulled out a pair of sweatpants and a button-down shirt he guessed might fit - they did, though the shirt was a fraction clingy round the arms and chest. Then he sat him down and he took out a set of clippers; he shaved Drake's hair down short like it'd been the day he'd gone ahead and staked him in the chest. He still had the scar, still looked at it in the mirror sometimes, still craned his neck and looked down at it till his eyes went blurry. Then he snipped his beard down short with a pair of scissors, lathered his face and his jaw and his neck and shaved him clean then washed him off, his fingers all over Drake's vampire-warm skin. He looked...normal. Except for the welded-on ring around his neck that tied him to the room. 

"I'm gonna strap you back down now," Hannibal said then, once he'd brushed the stray shaved-off hair from Drake's shirt and his neck. Drake nodded. He went with him back to the bench. 

"Thanks for this," he said after, while Hannibal was tilting the bench back, laying him down on his back. "I feel...better." 

Hannibal gave him a tight, strained smile, and he turned to leave. 

Later that night, it didn't feel like it'd been altruistic. It didn't even feel like he'd been doing his job. When he turned off the light he shoved his hand into his boxers and Jesus Christ if it wasn't Drake he was thinking of when he came.

\---

Weeks passed. 

Blade came by and raged at the lot of them, something about how could they let Drake live when he was what he was, when they knew what he was? It was actually Abby of all people who talked him down and that was a relief 'cause none of them would've been able to stop Blade from getting in there and staking him through the heart, no more Drake, no more Daystar. Trials had been a limited success. They'd taken out whole nests. Their guys in Houston had cleared the city pretty much completely. Atlanta was next on the list.

At night, he and Abby went out with the team and sometimes they found vamps and sometimes they didn't. They wound their way back in through the labyrinth of corridors and Hannibal started to remember the way after the first twenty times, he was pretty sure, swiping in with his card, spreading his hand on the scanner behind the shelves in the supply closet to get back inside afterwards. He wasn't sure if he liked Las Vegas or not, since he saw it roughly between the hours of 1am and 3am each night. but it was an experience. 

In the day, he helped Zoe with her homework and he cooked badly in the kitchen and he watched shitty soap operas on the TV in the lounge. Some days he trained. Some days he veged out and ate ice cream on the couch in his PJs because what the hell, you only live once. Sometimes Abby joined him. And every morning he went down the corridor into the lab and he passed Drake his daily dose of serum, and he sat there for twenty minutes, thirty minutes, an hour, while Drake started to tell him things about the past. Fucking Hippocrates, he remembered him. He was there in Rome when they fucked up Caesar. He saw Christ crucified. Wars in eastern Europe. Plagues. The Spanish Inquisition. And then, one day, he'd put on his armor and he'd gone to sleep in a tomb in what was now Syria.

"Why'd you sleep all that time?" Hannibal asked one day, lounging there against the wall, his legs crossed at the ankle. 

"Would you believe _ennui_?" 

"You want me to believe you slept for centuries 'cause you were bored in French?" 

Drake smiled. "Something like that," he said. 

They started exporting Daystar. Reports came in that they'd gotten pretty much all the vamps in Berlin and Hannover and taken back Norway and Sweden entirely. He told Drake; he seemed pleased, and they talked about the time he killed forty of his lieutenants for burning villages along the Rhine valley and murdered a despot in Carthage. They talked about Alexandria and the library and the lighthouse and books he still remembered that had been lost to time for centuries. Hannibal's high school history teacher would've loved the guy. 

And then one night he went out the the team and a pack of vamps took out Bannerman and wrenched Hannibal's shoulder from its socket before the Daystar got to them. They dragged his corpse back to the casino, back down into the base. They made sure he stayed dead; they burned the body in the medical incinerator. It was shitty. Really, really shitty. It just reminded them all that fuck, in the end Daystar wasn't a cure-all - they had to stay on their toes, on the ball, get to them first, put them out for the count. The on-site doc shoved Hannibal's shoulder back in with a little help from Abby. Maybe he should've gone straight to bed after, with a couple of pain pills and a badly bruised ego, but he went to see Drake instead. He fell asleep against the wall an hour later. Apparently tales of Dracula's history were enough to soothe him to sleep - he hadn't even liked Bannerman all that much but fuck, mortality was a bitch.

"You snore," Drake said when he woke in the morning. 

"I do not."

"Yes you do. Like a drain." 

Hannibal chuckled. His shoulder still hurt like a son of a bitch and a night sagging against a wall hadn't helped. He picked himself up and went to fetch Drake's serum, had Alice out at the desk turn off the cameras on his way back in. He unstrapped him bit by bit and Drake took his dose as Hannibal unbuttoned the shirt he'd lent him; he took back the dispenser then he tugged down the sweats and Drake let him do it. Hannibal stripped himself naked then he helped him from the bench, Drake's arm around his shoulders, his arm around Drake's waist though it made his shoulder sting like a son of a bitch even through the sheen of analgesic.

Drake was weaker than he'd been the last time: he sagged against the wall and gripped loosely at Hannibal's arms and his pulse was quick under Hannibal's fingers. They went down on the floor, enough space in there for a whole goddamn team, sat there side by side under the spray thigh to thigh and shoulder to shoulder. Drake was looking at the place in Hannibal's neck where the blood throbbed just underneath the surface, not even trying to pretend he wasn't but Hannibal knew he was too weak to make a move. 

"I'm sorry for all of this," he said. 

Drake's gaze flicked up to Hannibal's eyes. He smiled wryly. "You didn't do it," he replied. "I did it to myself. Do you think I didn't expect this?"

It was a harrowing fucking thought, and one that he believed. He rested his forehead down against Drake's, under the warm shower spray. He shifted one hand to the nape of Drake's neck, just above the ring of metal chafing there. Drake closed his eyes. So did he. Day by day, he was watching him die, and that was exactly what Drake wanted. 

He couldn't go out that night, though he tried pretty hard to protest to the contrary - he'd worked while more injured, sure, but that hadn't been the most spine-tinglingly thrilling experience of his entire life. So he stayed in, and he made dinner with Zoe and her dad for all the scientists and they ate together in the dining room trying hard not to talk about work though that was pretty much all any of them had in common and fuck, they all thought Hannibal was the freakish fucking oddball who spent way too much time with the father of all vampires. He pretty much did, so there was no way to argue with that. 

And later, past eleven, he went over to the lab and had Alice's happier, smilier coworker to let him inside. He was halfway in, the vestibule door was just closing, when the walkie talkie on the desk crackled to life. The next door didn't open. The first one reopened. When he went back out, Jas the desk jockey had flicked one of the monitors to the camera pointed straight at the service elevator upstairs, the one that came down from ground level to the basement. Two guards were down in the corridor. The people heading out of the elevator were _not_ meant to be there, judging by the suits and the rebreathers and the automatic weapons. 

"Stay right here," he told Jas, and headed straight for the armory as the alarm began to sound. He took his guns, two knives, ammunition, a vest, and pulled the vest on as he ran back down to find Zoe. When he knocked at the door, there was no answer; Jesus Christ, the hunters were out, the guards were already deployed, and all he could do was hope to God no reply at the door meant Zoe had gotten herself into her panic room. 

"Stay in there, shrimp!" he called through the door, though she likely couldn't hear him - maybe she could see him on the camera in the hall outside her door, though, so he gave it a wave and then ran back to the lab. Fuck knew why the vampires were there because maybe it was Daystar and maybe it was Drake but he couldn't let them have either. Jas buzzed him into the room as she watched the screen, goggle-eyed, the guards upstairs getting fucked up, getting put down. It looked like Sommerfield Sr. had sent in casino security and they were just getting fucked up, too. He turned away and went in, vest and gloves in place, guns strapped to his thighs. 

"There's been a breach," he said. 

"Vampires?" 

"Vampires."

Drake took a breath, clenched his jaw. "Let me out," he said, and Hannibal thought that over, actually found himself thinking that over as he looked at him, found himself going over there and fishing the key from his pocket in what had to be the single dumbest move he'd made in months except there was nothing else to do, this was it, now or never, all or nothing. He unstrapped him, unlocked him, watched him struggle to his feet and fuck, that was _not_ going to work. They were royally screwed. 

Drake tugged at the chain that held him there. Hannibal was pretty sure he could've done better himself. "I can't break it."

"Yeah, I think that was kinda that point." 

"Is there any serum?" 

"Not enough," Hannibal said, and he jabbed at his eyes with the heels of his gloved hands. "Fuck. _Fuck_. I can't believe I'm even thinking this." He looked at Drake standing there half slumped against the side of the bench, his eyes blurry from the rubbing and somehow not being able to see clearly made it easier. Go figure. 

"Bite me," he said. 

Drake frowned. "You could draw--"

"We don't have that kind of time." He stepped up close. He hooked his fingers into the collar of his own t-shirt and pulled down, tilted his head to the side, bared his throat. "For fuck's sake, before I change my mind and we all die." 

Drake frowned at him for a second then he reached out an unsteady hand to the back of Hannibal's neck, and he drew him in. Slowly, almost fucking hesitantly and that just seemed fucking hilarious even in the moment, he pressed his mouth over the pulse there in Hannibal's neck that was beating double-time with adrenaline, fingertips trailing over his nape. For the love of Pete, for the love of God and Jesus and every fucking saint in the book, it wasn't meant to be sensual, wasn't meant to be intimate, but Drake's free hand found the small of his back, Drake's teeth pressed down, Drake's teeth pierced his skin and there it was, that same sickening fucking intimacy he'd shared with Danica. 

"If you kill me, I swear to God I'll come back and haunt your ass for the rest of time," he said, but his eyes were squeeze shut and his hands were gripping Drake's biceps like he had no intention of getting away. It sounded feeble even to him. And fuck, he thought he was going to die, really believed it, that Drake wouldn't stop till he was dead and then maybe if he was really unlucky he'd come back as a vampire just in time to get his head lopped off of his shoulders by the mob upstairs. 

But Drake didn't kill him. Drake pulled back, and Hannibal watched as the color flooded back into his skin, as Drake licked his blood from lips chin, as he leaned back in to lick what was left from Hannibal's neck. He shuddered. And then he watched Drake wrap the chain around his forearm and yank it straight out of the ceiling. Maybe he couldn't get the ring from around his neck, but the other end hadn't proved a problem. Then he tore the chain off from the loop at the back of his neck. Apparently his strength was back.

"Let's go," Drake said, and so they went. He told Jas to find somewhere to hide and stay there; she didn't question him as they made their way out, Hannibal unsteady on his feet but coming to with the adrenaline as they ran for the elevator. It opened. Out they came. 

Everything else was a blur. It was gunfire and yelling and blood on the floor and Drake's teeth in a familiar's throat, tearing, biting it out. It was Daystar in the air getting in through bulletholes in otherwise airtight suits and burning them inside like wicks in a candle. It was guards dead on the floor and vampires joining them and Hannibal barely even felt his fucked-up shoulder, let alone anything else. They moved together, glanced at each other through it, blood all over Drake's face and all over Hannibal's gloved hands, all over his shirt, everywhere. He was probably going to change if he didn't get the cure and fuck, he didn't want to go through that again. 

And then, it was over. There were no more vampires coming in through the elevator shaft, no more familiars getting in the way, no more fucking kung fu on steroids and the guns had all gone quiet. Drake looked at him, a glorious fucking mess of blood, teeth bared, on fucking fire. Hannibal knew how that felt. He was over there in a second and met him in a kiss, blood be damned. 

There were scientists cautiously exiting labs as they went, as the hunters came in too late, too fucking late, and started checking pulses, and maybe they should've stayed and helped but fuck that, really, fuck that. They went back to the lab and Hannibal opened up both doors together the exact same way they were never meant to do. They went in. They found the shower and they pushed and pulled and they got in there under it, kissed hard and desperate under the spray like that shit was going out of style. They washed off the blood, their hands on each other, all over each other, chests and arms and hips and Drake's palm found Hannibal's cock, found it already hard, let his fingers curl around it. He pressed his mouth to the scar at Hannibal's shoulder, the bite marks at Hannibal's neck. He pressed him back against the wall and Hannibal almost didn't care if he bit him again. He almost wanted it. 

They turned off the water. Hannibal went out into the room, dripping wet and right on edge, came back with some kind of medical lubricant and that was exactly what the situation called for as they went down on their knees, mouths together, the lube in Drake's hand though Hannibal couldn't recall having given it to him. He spread his knees wide and Drake's slick fingers teased between his cheeks, found his hole, pushed inside, made him gasp against his mouth. He pressed back against them. Then he turned, bloodied water draining all around them, went down on his hands and Drake pushed up into him, one deep stroke, too fast, too hard, but fuck if he cared, it felt good. Drake pulled him up, pulled him back against his chest as they knelt there, as he bucked his hips and fucked him, arms wrapped tight around his waist and Hannibal could barely catch his breath, definitely couldn't when one of Drake's hands went down to his cock and stroked. He came almost immediately, too soon, too fucking soon, but Drake was right there with him, jerking up inside him. He felt Drake's cock pulse in him as he came. He felt his teeth grazing at his neck, but the points didn't penetrate. 

He caught his breath with Drake still in him, with his back still pressed up to Drake's chest. When he turned as best he could without really turning, they kissed with Drake's fingers in Hannibal's hair, with one of Hannibal's hands at the back of Drake's neck. Then Drake eased back, pulled out, and slowly they went back up to their feet, turned the shower back on, washed themselves off for a second time. 

And after, once they'd dried off, once they'd dumped their bloody clothes in the trash and pulled on pairs of Hannibal's old sweats and t-shirts, they sat down side by side on the floor against the wall and they waited. 

Sooner or later, they knew someone would come for them. They'd find Hannibal bitten and Drake free. He wasn't going to be the one who locked him up this time. 

\---

Changes started small. They had to, 'cause even Hannibal was pretty fucking dubious and he was the one who'd unlocked him in the first damn place. 

When the Vegas team came in, they found them there together, so close they were touching. They first thing they saw was the bite marks at Hannibal's neck and all he could say was _I told him to do it, if he hadn't been in chains they wouldn't all be fucking dead_. They strapped Hannibal back down to the bench at gunpoint and they hauled Hannibal's idiot ass straight out of there and down the hall to the medical lab. The rattled-looking doctor snapped on a pair of gloves and drew blood and they sat there, waiting, the whole damn team loitering there 'cause somehow in the midst of all that mess both he and Abby had started to feel like they belonged. Then the doc retested. She frowned behind her glasses. 

"You're not infected," she said. 

"It's not just an incubation period, doctor?" Hamilton asked, though that was pretty dumb; the vampirism virus didn't do a whole lot of incubation that any of them had seen. It got to work right away. 

"No," she confirmed. "The cure must have..." She shook her head and gestured exasperatedly in Hannibal's direction - he had that effect sometimes. "Mr King seems to be immune."

He went back to his room and he fell into bed and he slept the rest of the night through. He slept most of the morning after that, dragged his ass out of bed around eleven and found Zoe reading in the living area with her dad. He was fucking ashamed he hadn't asked if she'd made it. He guessed he'd had other things on his mind, not the least of which being he was _immune to vampirism_. He could never be turned again.

He found the guys helping clear out bodies and he joined in for a couple of hours till they'd gotten them rowed out in the morgue, and it spoke volumes that a place like that had a morgue. Sommerfield Sr. came on down from his ivory tower up above ground to tell them all he'd called in fresh teams from out of state to cover lab security and they listened to Hannibal's story after that. And once they'd reviewed the footage of the attack, they actually believed him and didn't just nod and smile like they sometimes liked to do with bite victims because hell, he couldn't blame them, he'd done the same himself sometimes. He watched it with them out at the security desk that was basically riddled with bullet holes like Swiss cheese but somehow they'd managed to get everything back up and running in pretty damn quick time. There they were in the hallway on the screen, Drake and Hannibal side by side. There they were killing. There they were in the aftermath and somehow, no one was surprised when they got to the kissing part. 

"He saved my life," Hannibal said, sincerely. "Everyone who's left alive here owes him something." In a way, albeit a minor one, people started to agree. And that was when things started to change - when they believed Drake really had done all he could to help.

It started with taking off his chains. Strictly speaking, sure, it started with just not putting the chains back on because they'd not found a way to get the chain back to the collar around his neck, but it was a gesture anyhow and Drake seemed to treat it that way. That afternoon, they went in there with a cutter and Hamilton, looking wary, cut the ring away. No one really felt like getting in there to take his blood after, though, and they needed their not-quite-daily sample, so Hannibal did it just like normal; he snapped on a pair of exam gloves, pulled the tourniquet tight and bled Drake from the crook of his arm into a vacutainer. Drake watched him do it. Maybe Hannibal's hands lingered, but he didn't like to think about that. He'd already got too damn much to think about.

They didn't let him out, of course. They twin doors and their strange intermediary vestibule remained in operation, and Alice and Jas remained in their station at the near side of the glass. Really, the only difference was that sometimes Drake actually moved and sometimes because of that they actually had something to watch that wasn't DVDs of Star Trek on their spare monitor. They spent a week like that and then two, the new guards arrived, things settled down with heightened, tightened security. 

Next it was clothes. Abby let Hannibal loose with her laptop and the Nightstalkers' credit card that she'd been guarding night and day like she was concerned he'd max it out on video games, and he ordered a bunch of shit, jeans, shirts, boots, an assortment of underwear because who the hell know what the king of the vampires liked to wear under his pants? Hannibal watched on the screens as Drake changed just like a motherfucking pervert and Drake looked up at the camera like he knew he was being watched. Turned out the king of the vampires liked tighty whities. Turned out Hannibal couldn't fault the choice, the way they fit. He shouldn't've looked. He shouldn't've done half the things he'd done that night. 

"Danica dressed me before," Drake said, going through the clothes later in the day. "She had interesting taste." 

"Yeah, she used to like to dress me up, too," Hannibal replied. "And I wasn't her fucking Ken doll, y'know? I mean, I'm anatomically correct, at least." 

Once Hannibal was done explaining the purpose and configuration of a Ken doll to the first of all vampires, Drake smirked and looked him over. Hannibal tried not to think too hard about the fact Drake knew just how anatomically correct he was.

He reined in his visits after that 'cause hell, he couldn't be _that_ guy, the vampire groupie, the fanboy who wanted to get into Dracula's pants. Maybe it'd been the adrenaline, he thought. Maybe it'd been the blood, or at least the bite in his neck, how Drake had felt against him when he did it. Or maybe he just had the single worst taste of any guy on the face of the earth and actually had a thing for the lord of the fucking undead. Another couple of weeks, three, and he was only there in the morning, handing over the serum, waiting there to take back the dispenser. After the first couple of attempts to engage him in conversation, Drake quit it. He brought him shitty novels to read from the base library instead, ones that he'd read first and Drake scribbled notes in the margins like a goddamn literature professor so somehow it was almost like conversation carried on.

After that, for good behavior, they let him out of the room under guard. Hannibal showed him around the labs while the guards pointed guns at his central mass, showed him the library, the training room, showed him all the things he hadn't had time to see while they'd been dragging him in in a cage or he'd been tearing out throats during an attack. Drake kept looking at him, not at the others but at _him_ as they made their way around. He glanced at him as he introduced him to the scientists, who all kept their own sweet distance. He glanced at him as he took him back to the small, over-bright lab. 

"I appreciate this," Drake said, once they got back to the lab. 

"I'll let the big man know," Hannibal replied. "For the love of God, please don't think I did this." But, in a way, he guessed he had. He'd started it all, at least, and he hadn't stopped it. 

Four-man armed escorts turned to three then two then one at a time, and then suddenly there was no escort and Drake had the run of the corridors just as far as the locking doors. Sometimes Hannibal found him in the library, looking disgustedly or maybe amusedly at one history book or another that Hannibal had ordered in from online for him. Sometimes he sat down across the table and read with him though Jesus, the whole thing was fucking agony, knowing what Drake had done to his team before they fucked up Danica and her jackass henchmen and their fucking vampire dogs, knowing what the two of them had done the night of the attack. He had a vivid damn memory of Drake's hands on him, Drake's cock in him, shower water and blood swirling into the drain and goddamnit, when he went to bed at night, when he finished reading Drake's bizarre margin commentary for the night, he got himself off to the thought of it all. Then, in the morning, he'd look at himself in the mirror over the wash basin and he'd tilt his head and rub at the place in his neck where the puncture wounds from Drake's teeth had scarred.

After a month of that, after a month of really good behavior, they gave Drake a real room instead of a perpetually lit-up lab with a two-way mirror on one wall and a battery of video cameras all aimed at him night and day. Once they'd installed a freakishly heavy metal door and shifted Zoe out of their weird-ass little annexe - she went into a new secure suite to live with her father and her grandfather, now that construction was finally finished - they moved Drake in right across the hall from Hannibal and made damn sure they locked him in at night, just in case. They'd been needing less and less of his blood since Daystar had been perfected; the stored samples they had mostly kept them going, and though the serum didn't exactly keep him at his best, he was doing pretty well. He could've killed. Apparently, he chose not to.

Everyone still gave him a wide berth during the day after that, of course, except maybe for Abby who'd apparently gotten at least half used to the idea even though she barred the hell out of her door at night and slept with a gun under her pillow, but hell, that was just Abby. The hunters just eyeballed Drake when he passed like he was Satan incarnate. Given the way he'd looked in his other form when he'd still been able to shift into it, Hannibal guessed that seemed like something a fair assessment. And every single morning, even after he'd moved in across the hall, Hannibal unlocked the door each morning and passed him his serum. Then hovered there as Drake bit down and breathed in. 

"You know it's creepy when you look at me and do that, right?" Hannibal said one morning, maybe ten weeks since the attack, leaning semi-casually against the thick metal door frame. "It's like you're thinking about sticking your teeth into my neck again. That's generally considered antisocial." 

Drake took the dispenser unit from his mouth and set it back onto its little metal tray there in Hannibal's hands. "I was thinking about sticking my teeth into your thigh," he said. 

Hannibal's brows rose. "Well, yeah, 'cause that's not creepy at all," he said, though what he had in his head sure as hell didn't seem creepy as much as dick-tinglingly hot. He's never been into getting bitten like some people he's met but damn, the idea of Drake on his knees, Drake unbuckling his belt... suddenly his pants would vanish into thin air like a magician yanking away a tablecloth and he'd hook one knee over Drake's shoulder and fuck, the idea of Drake's mouth on the inside of his thigh, his teeth in his femoral artery, Jesus, fuck, it was hot. He had a problem.

Drake looked at him steadily and Hannibal turned and walked away but that night, Jesus Christ, he came so hard with that image in his head that he had to clamp one hand over his mouth to keep from shouting. 

The next thing was the door locks: word came down maybe a couple of weeks later and when Hannibal closed Drake's door that night, he didn't lock it behind him. It was a fucking tiring night 'cause Hannibal got no sleep at all but he wanted to be sure, sitting there facing the back of his own door with a pistol in one hand and a stake in the other. But Drake didn't even try the door of his own room, let alone Hannibal's, let alone the door that led out of the annexe. That didn't come till three nights later, when Hannibal was lying in bed with yet another trashy novel. 

"Is there something I can do you for?" he asked, when the door finally opened and Drake stepped inside, half-dressed. The light of Hannibal's shitty bedside reading lamp really brought out the guy's abs as he stood there, shirtless and barefoot in a pair of low-slung jeans Hannibal had picked out like his personal goddamn shopper. Hannibal guessed he hadn't had to work even half as hard for muscle definition as he had. Motherfucker. Somehow it was the petty shit that really counted, or at least Hannibal made it count - that made keeping him at arm's length easier. 

"You left my door unlocked," Drake said, and stood back against Hannibal's door once he'd closed it behind himself. 

"Dude, you're a genius!" Hannibal said, and put down his book as Drake eyed him across the room. "Yeah, I left your door unlocked."

"And you left _your_ door unlocked."

"I'm glad you picked that up from how you just turned the handle and walked inside."

"Why did you do that?"

"You mean you don't appreciate my sarcasm? Hey, man, no matter what anyone says, it's absolutely the highest form of wit." 

"I meant the door." 

Hannibal sighed. He ran one hand over his hair. "Yeah, I know," he said.

"I know you know." Drake's hand went out to his side and he turned the catch and he locked the door. "Answer the question." Hannibal's chest tightened. His stomach clenched.

"What _was_ the question?"

"You know." 

"I do?"

Drake raised his brows. "I'll rephrase," he said. "Did you leave your door open to invite me in?"

Hannibal knows there's a whole bunch of things he could've said then and sidestepped the hell outta there like a particularly speedy hermit crab. He could've said he always left the door unlocked at night, though it would've been a bald-faced lie. He could've said he was expecting someone else, but he was pretty sure it was pretty obvious he wasn't getting any and the only sex he'd had in months had been after the break-in. He could've said it was a test, though fuck knew what it would've tested. What he said instead was, "Yeah," and he nodded tightly. Because yeah, it'd been an invitation. It really had been. 

Maybe he hadn't meant it to be, or at least he hadn't thought he'd meant it to be, 'cause he'd tried to convince himself it was about safety and security and getting to the guy first if he decided to head out on some kill-crazy rampage, like there'd even seemed to be a hint he might, but Jesus. Turned out that was bullshit and it was all about dick. Specifically, Drake's dick. He hadn't had a guy in years, not since way before Danica picked him up that night, but he'd always had laugh-out-loud fucking lousy taste. Maybe he shouldn't've been surprised by it. 

Drake's response was to unbutton the waist of his jeans and pull down the zipper, and Hannibal watched him push them down over his hips and his ass and his thighs and step out of them one foot at a time. He was naked underneath - so much for the tighty whities - and he knew he was starting but fuck it, it wasn't like it could've been the first time the guy had been started at like a scene straight out of a goddamn cartoon, like Hannibal's tongue was about to roll out across the floor while his eyes popped right out of his head. And for the love of Pete, it wasn't even like the dude was all that hot. Sure, he was pretty eyes on the eye, but shit, the hockey player he'd dated in college had been hotter even if he'd broken his nose three times and lost two teeth. Maybe it was the whole King of the Vampires schtick, he thought, as Drake eyed him. Maybe it was the glyph scarred into his chest. Maybe it was the fucking weird thing his eyes did when he got real hungry or real turned on. Maybe it was the fact he could probably have killed him before Hannibal even managed to blink, but the fact he'd been choosing not to, ever since that night pretty damn near a year ago in the movie theater. 

"Stand up," Drake said. 

"Nuh-uh," Hannibal replied, and wagged his finger. "What's the magic word, Mr. Shitty Manners?"

Drake frowned. "I know several," he said. "Which one did you want in particular?"

"Jesus, you're overly literal." Hannibal threw back the sheets, trying not to ask himself if Drake had meant he knew real, honest-to-God magic words or if he'd just gotten better at make-believe because somehow either way it seemed like a valid option. Then he stood himself up in his underwear, clingy boxer-briefs he might've rethought if he'd've realized Drake planned a little nocturnal visit and then again he might not have. "It's please. Please is the magic word. Say it with me: _please_."

Drake did something suspiciously like smiling. "But you've already done what I told you to do," he pointed out. 

Hannibal dropped his head melodramatically into his hands. "So try it next time you want me to do something," he said, and looked up at him between his fingers. "And while we're talking etiquette, if there's shit you want me to do, ask me, don't tell me. You might be a big shot vampire but I'm not your fucking valet." 

"Take off your underwear," Drake said, and this time he definitely smiled. "Please."

"Now that's better." Hannibal took off his underwear and tossed it into his laundry basket, and maybe he was about to say something flippant - it would've been a surprise to no one - but then Drake stepped forward, Drake stepped toward him, and suddenly whatever the hell he'd been about to say seemed significantly less important than Drake's hands going around his wrists and the way Drake's pupils split that freakish way they did. Drake went in even closer and put his mouth hotly to the side of Hannibal's neck and for a moment he thought that was it, he was going to bite and finish off what he'd started that day back in Vance's office with the stake in Hannibal's chest right where the scar still was. But he didn't bite. 

He moved instead, he pressed his mouth by Hannibal's left collarbone and he lifted Hannibal's left hand, kissed his upper arm, then the inside of his wrist, the points of his teeth scraping but not piercing. He ducked his mouth to the center of Hannibal's chest and then went down on his knees and Drake's mouth went to Hannibal's thigh and Jesus, Hannibal got it: he was cataloging his fucking arteries, places he could've bled him from and left him dead on the floor for someone to find in the morning and ferry straight down to the morgue or the incinerator. He shivered. Drake looked up as he wrapped his hand around the base of Hannibal's cock; he was already half-hard in spite of himself. 

"Do you always play with your food?" Hannibal asked. 

Drake licked a broad stripe up over the side of Hannibal's cock, teased at the head with the tip of his tongue, then looked up at him again. 

"Do you really think I'm going to eat you?" he asked, stroking him slowly.

"The thought had crossed my mind, yeah."

Drake sealed his lips around the head of Hannibal's cock and sucked with a swirl of his tongue that made Hannibal suspiciously weak-kneed, so he gripped at Drake's broad shoulders to steady himself. It was just as well; fuck knew how he'd explain a sex-related concussion to the in-house doctor if he fell and knocked himself out. Maybe she'd've been amused. Chances were she wouldn't've been.

"I want you alive more than I want you dead," Drake said. 

"Well Jesus, that's romantic." 

"It's the truth." Drake smiled faintly as he ran his hands up over Hannibal's thighs, ran them back over his hips to squeeze his ass. Drake's eyes were on him as he got his fingers between his cheeks and rubbed bluntly at the hole there, and Hannibal's cock gave an interested twitch, the traitorous son of a bitch. "Do you want me to stop?"

"Well of course I don't!" Hannibal replied, so with a glimmer of amusement Drake took him back into his mouth. 

He sucked him till he came, one hand squeezing so tight at Hannibal's hip that he was pretty sure it'd bruise if it didn't actually full-on crush his pelvis, the tip of the other hand's index finger teasing at his hole so fucking feather-light and maddening that Hannibal almost grabbed Drake's wrist and pushed back against it, lube be damned. But Drake sucked and Hannibal came and Drake held him up as he sagged through the knees but then, fuck, Drake pushed him down on his back on the bed and followed over him, propped himself up on his hands as his dick pressed hard to Hannibal's abdomen. Hannibal fumbled with the drawer by the bed, somehow still so damn turned on he was practically shaking, and came back with lube that he slapped down on his own chest like the world's most obvious invitation. Drake chuckled and sat himself up on his knees between Hannibal's thighs. 

"You're really not scared of me at all, are you," he said. "I think you might be the only one."

"Are you kidding me?" Hannibal replied, halfway to incredulous as he watched Drake flip open the tube and squeeze. "Jesus Christ, you scare me shitless." Drake slicked his fingers as Hannibal watched, then slipped them down against him; Hannibal willed himself to relax as Drake worked one finger into him, though that was pretty fucking futile considering how he was still so damn turned on he just wanted to squeeze around it till he came a second time. "But I'm scared of you like I'm scared of all the guys I've slept with, in that _Jesus Christ, what the fuck am I doing?_ way, not 'cause you're some kind of prince of fucking darkness lord of the vampires, oh me oh my I'm terrified." 

He reached up and ran one hand down over the glyph on Drake's chest, then flicked him on it with a quirk of his brows, and Drake snickered at him under his breath. 

"I guess I'm saying I'm not in awe of you," Hannibal said. "There's a difference." 

And judging by the look on Drake's face as he ran the pad of one thumb over the glyph tattooed there on Hannibal's abdomen, almost too hard like he was trying to rub the damn thing out, it really did make a difference. 

When Drake finally actually fucked him, he did it sitting back on his heels with his knees spread wide and Hannibal's legs wrapped tight around his waist. He slicked himself and then he pushed inside him, slowly, Hannibal's hands around the metal bars in the headboard, straining, pulling up his hips so Drake could get in deeper. He was breathless like he'd just run a fucking marathon to give his high school girlfriend's psycho dad the slip, or that time in college playing lacrosse while it was 99 in the shade and the hockey guy he'd been screwing had almost passed out in a heap right there on the field. Drake's hands were tight at the back of his thighs and Hannibal pushed down against him, made himself gasp, his legs cinched tight around him at the ankles. Drake's breath caught and he bared his teeth and he fucking growled as he bucked against him, jerked and came, his eyes on him all the while. 

"Well, that was unexpected," Hannibal said, as Drake pulled out and wiped himself down with a handful of tissues. 

Drake leaned down and pressed his mouth to Hannibal's, the weight of his body pressing him down firm against the mattress, then he stood and stretched hugely, muscles shifting underneath his skin. "Was it?" he asked.

Hannibal shrugged, his shoulders complaining 'cause apparently he'd pulled too hard at the damn headboard. "Yeah, not really," he admitted, 'cause they'd been skirting around it for weeks by then, and Drake had the gall to look amused by that, which under any normal circumstances would've kinda been the point. Of course, they'd sped straight past normal about a hundred miles and three towns back. And of course, nothing had been normal in Hannibal's life since the night he'd run into Danica Talos in that bar that one night, years ago, and the hell of it was he couldn't even remember the name of the place. He couldn't even remember the street it was on. All he remembered was her in that dress with her crazy hair and everything that had happened after. 

Drake gave him one last half-amused look and he pulled on his jeans and he left the room. 

Hannibal picked his book back up again and shifted back to reading just like nothing had happened. Except he was pretty damn sure it had. He was pretty sure it would happen again.

\---

It happened again. 

In the morning, Hannibal took a shower then realized he'd meant to go work out and so wet-haired and weirdly pissed at himself - probably less to do with his forgetfulness and more to do with other events - he took himself down to the training room. He was down on his back on a mat doing a set of crunches with a scowl on his face that could've turned a lesser man to stone when Abby turned up and nudged him in the side with the toe of her sneaker. When she dropped a wooden staff on his chest, he guessed that meant she wanted to spar. 

They'd been at it for nearly ten minutes when the doors opened and Drake wandered in; Hannibal saw him take a seat on a bench by the wall and Abby took advantage of his momentary distraction to rap him straight across the knuckles with the end of her staff. He cursed. She smiled. 

"I think we can safely say you win," Hannibal told her, and they turned for the rack where the staffs were kept, but Drake stood and held out his hand to Abby. She frowned and then shrugged and okay, so maybe it wasn't some kind of momentous occasion but it kinda felt like it when she handed Drake a weapon and disarmed herself in the process. Drake took the staff and Abby headed out, maybe to the range, maybe to the shower, who knew. What Hannibal was interested in was the fact that Drake lifted the staff and lifted his brows like a challenge. 

"Yeah, I'm pretty sure this is _not_ going to be a fair fight," Hannibal said, but went back to the mats anyway. 

"I'll keep one hand behind my back," Drake replied, and true to his word he did just that, but damn if he wasn't still ten times faster than Hannibal, ten times stronger, even without blood, even on the serum. Drake held out his hand when he was done, when he'd tossed Hannibal down to the mat hard enough to wind him completely, and Hannibal took it; Drake pulled him up to his feet again like the weight of him was nothing. Hannibal was pumped from the fight, still half pissed off at himself, angry for no fucking good reason, exasperated though who the hell knew why. When they put the staffs back, he pushed Drake up face first against the wall. He closed his eyes and rested his forehead down between Drake's shoulder blades, rested his hands down at Drake's hips and sighed. 

"I got clearance to take you out tonight," he said. 

Drake turned slightly; Hannibal straightened up enough to look him in the eye over Drake's shoulder. 

"Your superiors are happy with that?"

"Yeah, don't think there won't be an armed team ready to hack off your head at the first sign of trouble." 

Drake smiled faintly. He turned and leaned back against the wall and Hannibal stepped up, rested one hand against the wall either side of Drake's shoulders like maybe he stood a chance of keeping him there if he wanted to leave. He knew he didn't. After a moment, eye to eye, Drake's hands at his hips, Drake's thumbs rubbing at the skin just under the hem of his shirt, he stepped away. Drake let him go.

Later, Hannibal made good on that promise: they went out. He slung on his leather jacket, tucked his gun into a shoulder holster and found Drake there in the library like usual, reading. They left, went up in the elevator to the casino basement, took the service elevator up to the casino floor and went out into the busy room, wandered past blackjack tables and roulette wheels, paused at each new game so Hannibal could explain the mechanics of it; he'd done some gambling in college, nothing serious, enough to know the ropes. Then they made their way past the slot machines, weaved between the people wandering in from the street, and went out of the building. 

Sometimes it was pretty easy to forget that Drake was something close to six thousand years old. Sometimes it was pretty easy to forget that Drake hadn't seen much of the modern world. They took a walk, strolled around for hours, Hannibal explaining Vegas was _not_ the standard US city and Drake looking around in amused bemusement about two steps away from fucking Encino Man. They talked as they went, stopped into a club so Drake could really get a flavor of a Saturday night in Las Vegas then had a drink in a bar like civilized people, like Drake wouldn't've rather his glass be filled with fresh blood. They tried a strip club after that and Drake found the concept hilarious, and all the time there was a team of guards on their tail just in case. That was just good sense. 

They went out the next night, too. The night after that they did, too, but cut it short so Hannibal could take his place with the team and say hey to their old pal Caulder who'd come in to take Bannerman's place. And in the daytime Drake found him in the training room and they fought over and over, half amused and half turned on till Hannibal was as damn sexually frustrated as he'd ever been in his life before, till when he found him in the library in the afternoons he was thinking about bending Drake over the table right then and there, no care in the world for who came in or who might be watching the camera feeds. He didn't. He kept his hands to himself. What he did instead was come in one day with a local newspaper and slap it down on the table in front of Drake. 

"How about you read about something that's happening now, not six hundred years ago?" Hannibal said. "The warehouse fire on page eight was us. We're pretty sure we've cleared Vegas." 

Drake opened the newspaper. "And how close are you to killing them all?" he asked, glancing up at him. 

"Close." 

"And what will you do then?" 

"Take a really long vacation," he replied. "Get some sun. These damn night shifts are kicking the shit out of my complexion." 

They went out again that night, the next night, the next; in the day they trained, or he found Drake in the library with a stack of old newspapers and new ones, scissors and a glue stick, pasting stuff into a binder like he'd taken up scrapbooking and hell, Hannibal guessed at least he had a hobby. They went out again the next night and the next and maybe it was a shitty idea but one night, after the first week, after eight or nine days, Hamilton came in and said maybe Drake would like to get personally involved in the fight. Drake seemed interested and they were only going out a couple of towns over, to a bar at the side of a back road where maybe there were vampires and maybe there weren't, so they took him along, pointedly did _not_ give him a weapon and told Hannibal to watch him. That seemed fair.

When they walked in, Abby and Hamilton in front, Caulder bringing up the rear with Greer, it was a fucking vampire orgy. Six minutes later, all the vampires were dead and burning on the floor from the Daystar they released into the air once the fighting had stopped, except for Drake. All it did for him was make him look a little green around the gills, so Hannibal ushered him into the back of the van. He knew they'd wondered what might happen if he'd been exposed again, but hadn't really expected them to try it out in the field. Daystar hadn't been the plan. Hamilton swore up and down it hadn't been the plan and fuck knew who'd actually released it. Hannibal suspected Abby, and frankly couldn't say he even really blamed her. However useful the guy was, he'd still killed her friend. 

When they got back to the casino, back down into the base, Drake was looking worse. A quick blood sample for the lab and Hannibal hauled his ass back to his room, sat him down on the bed, stripped him down to his underwear and got him into bed. Drake made some wiseass remark about coffins and Hannibal rolled his eyes in best drama queen style but Drake really wasn't looking good by then. 

"Next time, we'll get you into one of those vampire gimp suits," Hannibal said. "It'll be a great look on you. Really avant-garde." 

Drake sighed thinly and let his eyes close. "I think I might pass on that," he said. "I just need to eat. I'll be fine after I get a dose of serum in the morning." 

Hannibal kicked off his boots and stretched out next to him on the bed. "Maybe I can help with that," he said. Drake's eyes reopened, though they took a second to focus. Hannibal gave him a wry half smile. "You remember when you bit me that night?" Drake nodded faintly. "Yeah, well. I didn't take the cure after."

"You didn't change."

"Yeah. It turns out I'm immune." He frowned. "Don't take that as an invitation to bite me whenever the hell you like, okay? Unless you take it as an invitation to, y'know, _bite me_." Drake smirked. "I know, who knew the cure was like some kind of vampire prophylactic." 

Drake shifted. Drake pushed himself up onto his side and leaned over, nuzzled at the crook of Hannibal's neck, pressed his mouth to the bite scars and Hannibal shivered. He knew what he'd just offered was fucking insane but there it was: hell, he was technically still responsible for the guy's care and maintenance, and everyone would've been pissed if he'd left Count Dracula to die in bed overnight so maybe, just maybe, it made actual logical sense. If he squinted and crossed his eyes. 

But Drake didn't bite, at least not there. He shifted down, slowly, weakly, pushed up the hem of Hannibal's shirt and fumbled at the button of his combat pants till Hannibal shooed him away, popped open the button, then lifted his hips and pushed them down to his thighs himself. Drake did the rest, pulled down Hannibal's boxers and pressed his mouth to the Talos glyph there low on his abdomen, grazed it with his teeth. Damn, that shouldn't've been such a turn-on, Hannibal thought, though when Drake's teeth came down to his thigh, when he pushed up Hannibal's right knee and hooked his arm through under it to hold him there, when he turned his head and bit, _that_ shouldn't've been a turn-on, either. 

He didn't take much, just enough to make Hannibal feel slightly dizzy, enough to make him wonder if he wasn't going to stop just before he did. Drake paused then, pressed his mouth to the marks he'd left, then went up on his knees. He looked pretty instantly improved, brighter, more vivid somehow now there was blood in him, and Hannibal's goddamn dick decided the sight of him there shirtless in his underwear looking vital and solid and hard in his briefs, was enough to kick things off for him, too. He chuckled at himself, shook his head, and when Drake eased him over onto his side and settled up behind him, he didn't even try to stop him. He hitched up his top knee and he braced himself against the wall next to the bed where it was shoved up into a corner and Drake pushed his briefs down over his hips, slicked himself, pushed up against him. He pushed into him, made Hannibal set his jaw and push back and damn, it felt good, Hannibal's head still reeling from the tiny fraction of blood loss, Drake's arm around his waist, his mouth pressed to his shoulder. He did it slowly, one hand going down to squeeze at Hannibal's balls, making him groan like a fucking oversexed teen as he pushed back against him. And it lasted, it lasted a fucking age, made him tingle all through his abdomen right down into his cock when Drake wrapped his hand around him and started to stroke, languid but intent. 

And when it was finally over, when Hannibal came and squeezed his eyes shut so tight he saw lights, when Drake's thrusts turned erratic and he pulsed in him and came with his teeth not quite puncturing Hannibal's neck, all Hannibal could do was laugh under his breath and rub his face with his hands. Drake pulled back and he stood. Hannibal turned onto his back and watched him wipe himself down.

He expected him to leave after that. It would've made sense, even if he'd just decided to leave to maraud freely up and down the halls as far as the locked lab doors or the elevator with the biometric call button on it, just because he could these days after a hell of a long time literally chained in place. But what he did was stretch, joints cracking loudly, then settle himself back down on Hannibal's bed, close enough that their shoulders touched. 

"You're staying?" Hannibal asked, pretty damn close to incredulous. "You know your own room's right across the hall, right? Did you need me to draw you a map? I'm a shitty artist, you might get lost."

Drake turned his head, so close in the lamplight that Hannibal could barely focus on him. "I'm staying," he said. "You object?"

Maybe he should've. He probably should've, if just because it was a tight fit for two guys their size in Hannibal's not-quite-double bed. He shook his head instead. "Nah," he said. "Someone needs to be here in case I pass out. And you're full of Daystar."

"You're saying it's practical?" Drake asked, amused. 

Hannibal shuffled, turned, and kissed Drake's mouth. 

"I'm saying stay," he said.

\---

It happened again. And then it happened _again_.

Two days later, they went out on another hunt, farther away. Four days after that, they went on another; three after that, another, until the whole thing was regular excursions out into Utah, Arizona, California, into the rest of Nevada. When they didn't need Daystar, Drake went with. When they did, he stayed on base.

Reports were pouring in of successes from around the world, Daystar working on a massive scale, vampires gone, familiars in disarray. They seeded Daystar into vampires' blood supplies, spread it through air conditioning systems, shot it in bullets and took them out and there were casualties on their side but somehow they were small, though clearly every death counted. Every death was worth something. And every night, after the reports, after the hunts, Hannibal went back to his room and he stretched out on his bed. Every night, Drake joined him; sometimes all they did was sleep, which he guessed Drake was pretty good at, all things considered. Sometimes they had other things in mind, and it wasn't usually a good game of _Clue_. 

Vampires were getting scarcer by the week, by the day, until they were heading out on longer trips and sometimes even then they didn't find them, till they were staying in shitty motels overnight sometimes or they drove in shifts while the others slept. Everyone had to know they shared a room while they were on the road, everyone had to know that Drake had pretty much moved into Hannibal's room back on base, to the point where after three weeks or so he just came right out with it and requested a bigger bed. He got it two days later and it half filled the room but since the room was pretty basic and bare, like a freaking asylum, that didn't seem to matter much. It started to bother him less that he was sharing his bed with a vampire every night, _the_ vampire, the first one. Maybe that should've bothered him in itself. The team would probably want him dead, too, once the rest were gone.

Nevertheless, the guys started training with Drake in the day. Learning how to kill vampires had always been a pretty shitty curve, 'cause chances are the sons of bitches were also trying to kill you, so having Drake on hand to show them exactly what to do was kinda neat. They all got better at it, not even particularly slowly, though Drake had to know he was pretty much just teaching them all how to kill him. He didn't seem to give a damn. Hannibal started to think he cared if Drake lived or died more than Drake did himself. He was fucked if he could say that out loud, though. The whole emotion thing had always seemed around ten times harder than just cracking wise. The fact that he had emotion was pretty fucked up; feeling meant he had to feel shit about Danica, and that wasn't a place that he liked to go. 

They trained in the day or they read or they watched TV on the couch in the science lounge and everyone had kinda gotten used to the vampire in the room somehow, like the novelty had worn off, like they'd removed his fangs like declawing a cat though Hannibal knew better than most how fucking sharp his teeth still were. Over the couple of months since Drake's first outing with the team, he had three more accidental Daystar exposures, and each time they went back to their room after and Drake put his teeth in a new and interesting place on Hannibal's body, the crook of his arm, his wrist. The effect was always immediate. The effect was striking and ended in sex like a fucking aphrodisiac, Hannibal up on his knees or stood up leaning hard against the wall. The third time, Drake slicked himself and rode him, jerked himself till he came over Hannibal's chest and brought him over, too. The next night, half drunk with adrenaline after a hunt, Hannibal bent Drake over his usual table in the corner of the library and he had him there, both mostly clothed, with a chair pushed up under the door handle. He did it hard and deep and slow with the table legs scraping loudly against the floor, his hands tight at Drake's hips, pulling out at the end of each stroke just to push back in balls-deep and gasping. Drake pushed back against him, cursing in a language Hannibal didn't know at all, but the sentiment was obvious. He hadn't fucked a guy in years but he wanted it, he wanted _him_. The way Drake sounded, the way he fucking devoured him after they were done, he wanted it too.

And then, late one night or maybe early morning, he woke and Drake wasn't there. And he kicked himself as he wandered the place barefoot with his guns in his hands and his heart hammering hard in his chest, wondered how he'd let himself be drawn in that way, how he'd let himself be so thoroughly fucking fooled. Except there Drake was in the library, reading. Of course he was. Of _course_ he was. 

Hannibal pulled himself up to sit on the table next to him, put his guns down behind him. Drake looked up.

"You thought I was gone," he said, straightforwardly. 

"Was it a test or couldn't you sleep?"

"I couldn't sleep," Drake said. " _Then_ it was a test."

"And I failed." Hannibal patted his guns. "I guess I failed in pretty spectacular style." 

"I'm not surprised, given who I am. I wouldn't necessarily call that a failure."

Hannibal shrugged. "You are who you are," he said. "I always knew that." He leaned forward and he patted Drake's cheek. "Don't get melodramatic, Drake. There's only enough room in this relationship for one drama queen and I'm it." 

Drake raised his brows; Hannibal smiled tightly. The R-word hung in the air between them though fuck it, it was true, it'd pretty much been true since the first time he gave Drake his blood. And then Drake leaned past him and picked up one of Hannibal's guns; he thumbed off the safety and Hannibal watched him do it; he lifted it, pressed the muzzle up under Hannibal's chin, and he watched him do that, too.

"Do I scare you more or less with this?" he asked. 

Hannibal shrugged. "Ironically, less," he said. "Do you want me to be scared?"

"Perhaps you should be." He trailed the gun down, held the muzzle tight to Hannibal's chest, but it wasn't even much like he meant it. "You know your friends are going to kill me when I'm the last one left."

"That wouldn't exactly shock me." He shifted slightly, careful of the gun but what he'd said was true because somehow the idea of Drake using a firearm just seemed faintly ridiculous. "Didn't you pretty much expect to die from all this? Didn't you pretty much want to? Not that I'm saying that's not fucked up because trust me, it is." 

"Perhaps." He put the safety back on, turned the gun in his hand and handed it to Hannibal, like he agreed that the idea of him using a gun was the bizarre side of side-splitting. "Imagine for a second that I have something to live for. What if there was another option?"

"And what would that be?"

Drake scooped up the binder that he had there on the desk, the binder full of newspaper clippings like he'd turned into some old lady coupon-cutter, and he passed it to him. 

"Haven't you ever wondered if there's anything out there going bump in the night besides vampires?"

Hannibal opened the binder. "Werewolves," he said, reading Drake's weirdly neat handwriting there across the top of the page, familiar from all his margin notes. 

"Werewolves," Drake replied. 

"Howl-at-the-moon, fur-in-uncomfortable-places, gnaw-your-face-off werewolves."

"And witches," Drake said. "Trolls. Ogres. Incubi. Sirens. You've all just spent so long focusing on vampires that you've forgotten the rest."

It made a sick kind of sense, Hannibal guessed: how could there only be vampires? Maybe they'd just been right at the top of the food chain, the most immediate and widespread threat. So they went back to bed and in the morning, they took the idea to the boss. Surprisingly, he listened.

Two weeks later, under a bright full moon, the Vegas hunters killed their first werewolf. Drake did it while the others took aim, shoved his arm straight into the ugly fucker's chest and tore its heart straight out. None of the humans in the team would've been able to do that and they knew it. 

Maybe Drake didn't have to die after all. Maybe Drake didn't actually want to.

\---

It's been two years. Two long, long years, full of damned inconvenient travel plans and perfecting the art of packing for the journey as well as the destination. Hannibal's gotten better at it. Drake might actually have gotten worse, though Hannibal's not actually sure how that's possible.

They'll pull off the road again later and stay in some shitty motel just like they always do while they're on the road, some place that looks kinda like the set of _Psycho_ 'cause somehow they always do till he's half concerned about stepping into the shower. Of course, generally the most dangerous thing in the room is Drake and these days it's pretty widely accepted that he's not scheming to rip out Hannibal's throat. He's had plenty of opportunities. 

They're meeting Blade in Texas 'cause even now the vampire houses are gone the guy can't sit still long enough to start to crack a smile. Drake seems to respect him even though Blade's surly ass can't even muster a greeting half the time and damn, Blade's unimpressed as shit with Hannibal and that just makes him run his mouth longer, maybe even louder. Blade's specialty's still stray vampires, since they keep popping up here and there, now and then - hell, it's not like they're under any illusions that some didn't escape and go to ground. Maybe they'll never kill 'em all. Maybe that helps keep Drake alive, too - there's no Daystar without his blood, after all. Hannibal's still the only one who draws it. They both prefer it that way.

Blade says one day they'll find out what Drake really wants. Blade says one day they'll've killed every last motherfucking vampire on the earth but him and then Drake'll just start making new ones and they'll see he never lost the things he says he lost, that he could've changed his form at any time. He'll raise a fucking army, and he'll know all their tricks. But Blade's just a gloomy Gus sometimes and Hannibal figures they'll cross that bridge when and if they come to it. He's had years, after all. But sometimes Hannibal has try real hard not to think about something Abby once said about long games, about long cons, about six thousand years. Drake knows enough about history to know not to repeat it, but who knows, maybe he'll try it anyway.

"I used to keep humans, every now and then," Drake told him once, in a shitty motel outside Phoenix, or maybe that was Pasadena. Sometimes the places start to blur together they saw so many of them. 

"Familiars?" Hannibal replied. 

"Something like that," he said, and he smiled like he was remembering something, sometime, someplace Hannibal had never seen. "The first was a prince. I was young then. He was older."

He traced the glyph there on Hannibal's abdomen with one fingertip, not quite idly. He's never gotten it removed though he's thought about it sometimes. He's thought about getting it covered over with Drake's, though that just seems like the biggest fucking cliché in the world, so there it stays. 

"I didn't kill him," Drake said, not defensive, just straightforward. "I didn't turn him. He died of old age. They all did." He pressed his mouth to Danica's glyph. He pressed his mouth to Hannibal's bearded jaw. "Familiars weren't minions then, you see. They were consorts."

Hannibal remembers laughing, maybe not at him or himself but the fucked-up situation. He remembers pushing Drake down on his back and straddling his hips. He remembers kissing him, remembers leaning down against the headboard and peering at him, damn near nose to nose. 

"So I'm your consort?" he asked, maybe teasing, maybe not. 

"Something like that," Drake replied. And Hannibal thinks one day he'll go back and retrace every single time he's said that. He thinks he'll ask him exactly what he meant, what he elided. He'll work his way up to that one.

They'll pull into a roadside motel and they'll stay the night like they always do, sharing a bed just like they always do. They'll shower and shave, or Drake will since goddamnit Hannibal's still fond of his beard despite the heat, and they'll eat crappy takeout food or hit a diner and Drake will nurse a coffee; he could eat, but there's enough serum for the trip in Hannibal's backpack in the car trunk and fuck, failing that, it's not like Hannibal's run out of blood. It must be tough for Drake, he thinks. He knows it was for him. There was never a time he wasn't thirsty, but maybe it's different for him. Maybe that's something he'll ask him, too. He's got so many questions. Maybe he even wants to know the answers. 

Caulder gets back in in a blast of dry heat and he puts the key in the ignition, and as the engine turns, as the car lurches out of the parking lot, Drake opens up one eye. He smiles and then he closes it up again. Sometimes it really is hard to tell when he's sleeping and when he's awake. 

Hannibal knows what Drake is, he thinks, as they drive. He's always known, and he knows just how weird the situation is. No one will forget the things Drake's done, not really, and Blade's just the only one who says the words out loud while the others all think it, and so does he; the difference is, he hopes they're wrong. And fuck, it's not like he was some vampire boyscout back in the day with Danica. He's done things. He's seen things. He knows enough about redemption to want it to be true.

They'll pull into a motel and they'll stay the night, tangled up sweaty and tired in each other's limbs under some shitty ceiling fan that doesn't work the way it should. And if he wakes in the morning, Hannibal still won't know if he's one step closer to being proved wrong or one step closer to the end of Drake's game. 

He won't know until he knows. But Jesus Christ he'll make the most of it till then.


End file.
